We tried to talk it over - but the emails got in the way!

Posted by Richard Messik on Thu, 08/04/2010 - 11:19 in Blogs 1115 2 comments | report

I have taken a week off over the Easter break - haven't gone away but decided to stay at home and catch up with some writing and a multitude of little jobs that have been waiting for a convenient moment to complete (and will probably still be waiting when I go back to the office next week!).

Whilst the break from the normal routine is welcomed, unfortunately there is still the need to constantly check emails and in fact the first two days of my "holiday" were taken up entirely with dealing with urgent matters. ....And that, of course, is the problem with 24/7 contactability. You have to be extremely disciplined to cut yourself off completely ...and I am afraid I am not that strong willed. In many respects, email is a failed technology. We have all experienced the return to the office after a short absence to be faced with hundred of emails which take days to sort out. A large majority of these are trivia and unnecessary. The email from the colleague sitting at the desk next to yours is a sad reflection on our art of communication. And now we are faced with so many different forms of communication - email, text and now Google Wave, IM and a myriad of others. Used efficiently, email is a marvellous work aid - used inefficiently, its a curse.

Comments

Case in point...autoexpiry

cverrier | Fri, 09/04/2010 - 11:39 | Permalink

There's a little known feature in Outlook that I keep trying to remind people about, as a way of reducing clutter..

An awful lot of the internal emails that accumulate when you've been away are things that have a very short life ("I'm off to the pub - anyone joining me?" or "Who has Mr Jones' tax file" or "Sandwich man is now in reception", you know the sort of thing). If you're away from the office for a week then these emails are entirely pointless.

When you compose an email, there's an option under 'Delivery Options' to set an expiry date for your message. If it's not been read by the expiry date, it auto-deletes from the recipients in-tray.

How nice is that? Your in-tray automatically cleans itself of any email whose 'sell-by' date has expired.

Sadly, very few people know about it, and it's buried a fair way down in the options screens, so they don't remember to use it even when they do know about it.

Auto expiry

Richard Messik | Sat, 10/04/2010 - 11:17 | Permalink

Great point. The problem with auto expiry is that it is the responsibility of the author of the original email to use it. Now if there could be a similar option for the recipient - remove email if not read after x period of time.. that would be really useful. Can a rule be setup for this?

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