Now if he could also reduce meetings by 30%

Good friend Ross Mayf ield writes in Forbes about "email hell"

"According to Gartner Group, 30% of e-mail is "occupational spam," characterized by excessive CC, BCC and Reply-All use. Not by coincidence, Socialtext (that Ross co-founded) customers commonly decrease e-mail volume by 30% and moving e-mails to collaborative workspaces that are designed for one-to-many or many-to-many communication. "

The other big productivity killer in corporations is meetings. I am constantly surprised to see too many of my client employees just go from meeting to meeting - then, of course come back to their desks to handle the deluge of email!

May be Ross can start something called Anti-Social to allow employees more "alone" time :)

Comments

[Nitin Goyal]

Email has reached a tipping point with :
* Spam in personal email accounts (which generally do not have so much filtering capability as corporate accounts).
* Unmanageable mail volumes at work - People use many folders, try to move around emails and clean up as much as they can. However I am yet to see a person at work who has a completely empty/under control Inbox. I fondly recall that even as late as 2000 I did not have a personal Inbox disaster.

I think stage is set for us to make sensible use of email, like the way we do for phone. I wish Apple or Google came up with a tool which managed emails for us. There is a lot of elegant design and funky technology that is out there for the asking to manage this mess.

[Britton Manasco]

Perhaps it's sort of autocratic, but I have heard of companies adopting new technologies that actually force one to budget their email use. Constraints, by this theory, drive creativity. It's the email equivalent of P&G's one page-memo.

[vinnie mirchandani]

Britton, like what Seriosity is doing...

[Krupo]

Yeah, I'm bemused when I see seemingly non-stop meetings where half the people probably don't need to be there. The bemusement comes from being glad I don't have to be there. Phew.