Email Overload?

Are business users drowning in unwanted email or not? Some observers argue they are, and also say the overload is harming productivity. A typical analysis might be that a half hour a day is wasted when people have to deal with unwanted email. Over an eight-hour working day, that's 1/16 of total time at work. For a person earning $100,000, that's an annual loss of $6,250.

The countervailing view is that managing email is no more a "time waster" than socializing around the office, and might have positive value to the extent that all business is social, and that relationship building and maintenance of those relationships.

Granted, email can be chore if a user feels compelled to respond to every message. But there's no reason to respond to most messages, some would argue. Instead, email is part of a flow of communications and information that streams past a person, providing context on what other people one works with think is important.

Recognizing the pattern is the key thing, not "responding" to all messages in the flow. It's a little like "Twitter" streams, Real Simple Syndication feeds or Facebook updates. One doesn't have to respond to the updates. But the updates can have value.

The issue is whether "information overload" is a problem or an opportunity. Providers of unified communications capabilities obviously see the management of message streams as an opportunity; a chance to solve the inefficiency of missed, delayed or repeated communication attempts.

Where a company's cost structure or revenue streams are involved, "inefficient" communications are a problem. In other cases, maybe not. When information is a stream of messages about the state of one's environment, maybe not. The "problem" exists to a large extent only in compulsive response, or inordinate attention to, the flow of data.

The same might be said of other "interruptions" of one's work. To a point, pings from co-workers do "interrupt" the specific tasks any particular person has. On the other hand, to the extent that organizations are social, "interruptions" are part of the collaboration process. To the extent that business value grows from collaboration, "interruptions" simply are part of the collaborative process. So is collaboration wasted time? Hardly.