The email conundrum

Incessant email, ugh.

The misuse of email is tremendous.  Clive Owen at Wired writes, “Everyone complains about ‘e-mail overload’ — getting so much stupid corporate e-mail that you miss out on important messages.”

Two solutions.

The more practical and organizationally implementable makes email gamelike, from Wired:

Every employee is given virtual tokens — say, 100 a week, — that they can attach to e-mail they write. If you really want someone to read a message now, you attach a lot of tokens, and the message pops up higher in your correspondent’s Outlook inbox.

Turns out, it works.  “When a work group at IBM tried [it], messages with 20 tokens attached were 52 percent more likely to be quickly opened than normal. E-mail overload ceased to be a problem.”

The second possibility is one that has been visited before, from Edward Gottesman at Prospect:

The time has come for a public sector remedy: a tax, perhaps no more than 2p, or 3c, on every email sent. Opponents will argue that collecting the tax is impossible or unfair. Yet the status quo is unworkable.

Has your organization thought about trying to reduce the amount of email?  It needlessly keeps people behind their desks or inattentive on their Blackberrys/iPhones.