I spend 28% of my time reading your useless emails !

That’s what many employees could (should ?) say to their colleagues and managers.

I’ve been pleading for a system which would make the right information find the right people instead of sending grouped emails to people who don’t need them and often forgot those for whom it would have been useful.

I’m often answered the same thing : people may miss some information. Yes, of course. And that’s a good thing. They will miss any information that is useless at a given moment, will stop wasting their time reading what does not concern them and having to refocus on what they were doing. And if, one day, they need to find it, a simple search on the intranet will do the job.

I’m talking about making it possible for people to build their own information supply chain depending on their needs and concerns and not about other’s people needs to show they are working or to cover themselves saying ‘”but they knew”. We already do it very well on the web with, on the one hand published information, and in the other RSS feeds coming from identified sources or search agents and I can’t see any reason why we wouldn’t be able to do this within the enterprise.

And what’s about email ? Still useful to quickly reach someone in order to say something very important. Because, when talking about harnessing knowledge, we’ve already seen better things than an outlook archive.

I also anticipate the next question : “Oh…it takes time, it costs money !”. The answer is not. Instead of writing in a tool, people write in another, that’s all. And it will avoid the receiver to spend 30% of his time wasting it.

Indeed it’s the conclusion of a Basex survey published by the New York Times on information worker’s day spent.

You’re not dreaming. People are hired because of their ability to reflect and they only do that 12% of their time. 25% is pent to create contents, even if I’m not sure the part dedicated to writing emails is really productive.

And 28% is spent reading useless messages and getting back on track. Companies are looking for productivity gains ? 28% of employee’s time…it’s not trivial, is it ?

During this time, Luis Suarez decided to give up email at work and is telling us how it’s possible (here and here). If it’s possible in a company as hudge as IBM, it may be possible elsewhere.

It makes you wonder ?

Bertrand DUPERRIN
Bertrand DUPERRINhttps://www.duperrin.com/english
Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
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