It’s an all too familiar story, an overflowing inbox of rapid fire emails day after day. A ceaseless bombardment of meeting requests, news updates, design discussions, status reports, the list goes on. It doesn’t take long for this bombardment to push recipients into pavlovian responses such as:
- If the subject doesn’t have immediate meaning, delete the email
- Another status email which surely is like all the previous ones, delete it
- Another request to a meeting - book it into the calendar without a second’s thought
These behaviours and others are quite damaging to your organization. Potentially useful information is ignored, people end up permanently in meetings, never getting anything done or pausing to think strategically.
So what’s the problem? To echo a previous post, email is a push mechanism and worse, it tends to be an interrupting push mechanism. We are all familiar with bouncing icons or fading dialogues displaying recipient, subject etc of a just-received email. Email can also be problematic to manage:
- Mailing lists are difficult to keep up to date
- Getting on and off mailing lists can often be more complex than is desirable
- How do you find the right people to email to?
So what might we use instead? How about blogs and RSS feeds? Blogs are a fine place to publish announcements, news, status reports etc. We have a wide range of readers, online and offline and managing subscriptions is a key area of focus for these applications. RSS of course gives us a pull mechanism allowing subscribers to choose how often they receive the updates. All that’s left is to maintain a well known page to link the blogs (and you can regularly email a link to that page around) so that potentially interested readers can find the subject matter they require.
It all seems so obvious and yet there are still a mound of corporates out there that haven’t moved to this more balanced approach to information dissemination and co-ordination.
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