delete delete delete (day 26)

Luis Suarez says email can all but be eliminated.  He's down to 30-40 emails a week.  I drool when I hear those numbers.  These days I can never empty my inbox and I feel trapped by the email treadmill.  There are so many conversations that answering an email feels good but there is also a twinge of dread for the response.   The emails that scroll off my screen have a very high probability of never getting answered.  How did it get to this? I used to love email.  I suppose the asynchronous nature of email made us think that time was stretching.  The reality is that it takes way longer to type or read something than it does to have a conversation.  The same action items will result but conversing will get there more quickly.  I realize the benefits of email -- the record keeping, the attachments, the time to think about a response.  But I would say the bulk of my emails don't fall in that category.

Luis just said no more and stopped responding to email.  I'm not sure if he's down to zero responses but it's pretty close according to the talk I heard.   He has instead diverted his email conversations to other media.    He uses social networking tools like Yammer and blogs so he still has the record keeping but shares the information a little wider.   I suppose there would be a small overhead in diverting conversations but over time there would be less traffic in your inbox.   And maybe over time there would be less repetition.  Still, it may be my lack of imagination or cynicism but I have a hard time imagining that more software tools in my life will be better.   I have a task list, several calendars, two inboxes,  four blogs,  an RSS feed reader, and a facebook page.  I haven't even joined Twitter for fear of one more thing to check.

I admit that something has to change in my inbox wrestling moves.  Luis says we need to work smarter not harder.  It's glib.  I suppose I could change my habits in his kind of direction and see what happens.  I wonder if he has a step by step guide.

A song for this post.