Opinion: Avoiding death by e-mail

Computerworld - Do you love your e-mail? Come on, it's just the two of us. Do you really?

How much of it do you receive? How much do you actually read?

What started out as a promising productivity tool over 20 years ago has grown wildly out of control and now bobs on the tides of abuse that are so prevalent in our world today. A once-great time-saver now threatens to choke off and suffocate the very people it was supposed to help liberate.

This is especially true in the corporate environment, where e-mail is like that boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark, steadily gaining on Indiana Jones as he runs through a tunnel with no escape.

The time has come for bold change. And I recently witnessed something that gives me hope. We just need the right leadership.

The case against e-mail

Postal mail was great, though slow. Speed was why I loved e-mail, but over the last decade, the trade-offs for its convenience have mounted, and I now found myself spending five to six hours every working day just reading, filing, moving, responding to, moving again, writing and sending e-mail messages.

We are now plugged in 24/7 to all of our messaging streams. Woe to you if you go on vacation without access to them. The most common complaint I hear when people return is "I am still digging out of hundreds of messages!"

Having entered our lives innocuously, e-mail now has mutated into something with multiple means of preventing us from doing our jobs. And I'm not even talking about spam.

For one, it has evolved into the corporate file share. Need a document or spreadsheet? Here they are, via e-mail. That's convenient and easy, but it makes version control a nightmare. And our corporate systems get clogged up with this stuff. I have received 400MB documents unsolicited, only to find that I was unable to send out any e-mail because I was over my storage limit.

E-mail has also become the main corporate workflow tool. A proposal that needs a little bit of input from a lot of people will spend days or weeks wending through their in-boxes.

The most curious use I have seen, though, is for CYA purposes, invoking e-mail as a plausible deniability tool. Here's how this happens: Certain employees send me e-mails about every issue that arises, whether my input is needed or not, as well as numerous FYIs. As a result, I start to ignore anything from these people over time. Then some problem arises, I ask one of these people what they can tell me about it, and they immediately fall into CYA mode by pointing out that they sent me an e-mail message on March 4 talking about this very thing. Now it's my fault for not paying attention to their endless stream of input so I could pluck out that one bit of useful information.