Email Hell

The following is an article I contributed to Forbes.

E-mail overload is the leading cause of preventable productivity loss in organizations today. Basex Research recently estimated that businesses lose $650 billion annually in productivity due to unnecessary e-mail interruptions. And the average number of corporate e-mails sent and received per person per day are expected to reach over 228 by 2010.

The fundamental problem of this otherwise great technology is largely behavioral, and new practices and technologies are arising to solve it.

A major contributor to e-mail overload is broken business processes. When an environment changes, business processes fail to adapt, and this causes exceptions. For example, when a customer requests information that isn't provided by a standard support process, it can kick off a chain of e-mails hunting for information--and what is found isn't easily captured into the redesign of the process.

We haven't had good tools and practices for resolving these exceptions and learning from them. In  The Only Sustainable Edge, John Seely Brown and John Hagel identify that most employee time is not spent executing process, but handling exceptions to process.

Commercial e-mail spam filters and virus protection do a reasonable job today. What remains is behavioral--not how e-mail works, but how we work with it and how we shouldn't. According to Gartner Group, 30% of e-mail is "occupational spam," characterized by excessive CC, BCC and Reply-All use. Not by coincidence, Socialtext 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.

From a user's point of view, e-mail is what you could call a push medium. Beyond your control, anyone can push an e-mail into your inbox at near zero cost. By contrast, new Web 2.0 media emphasize pull technology: You choose who or what you want to subscribe to, pull information to you when you want it and unsubscribe when you want. Ideally, we would use push mediums for directed private or time-sensitive communication and pull for less formal, more public and less urgent communication. Now there is a choice--so long as you can gain agreement on which to use for what and how to use it.

Eugene Kim says there is "no such thing as collaboration without a shared goal." For every group that you regularly communicate with, one of your goals should be to increase communications efficiency and effectiveness. Without these shared goals and practices, behavior will not change. And with new technologies, you have the opportunity to transform communication habits into collaborative best practices.

Here are the top five tactics for making e-mail an efficient and effective collaboration tool:

Establish Internal E-Mail Practices

Within your organization or community, review your current e-mail habits. Consider establishing agreements on the formality, tone, brevity, distribution, responsiveness and timing. Then try bold experiments such as "E-mail-Free Fridays"--not necessarily because they will work, but for learning what could work and raising awareness of the cost of e-mail. Other peers might help bring awareness to work/life balance issues when always on mobile e-mail.

Move Group E-mail to Collaborative Workspaces

With enterprise social software solutions available on the market today, identify group uses of e-mail and move them to private workspaces. This creates a spam- and noise-free environment for the team. Different workspaces with different features can accomplish different goals. For example, create one where your team can hold less formal, blog-style conversations and general context sharing. Google     (nasdaq:       GOOG -        news     -            people     ) employees blog weekly in lieu of more formal reporting to make employees' work searchable. Or create more structured project workspaces with a process for archiving them at the end of the project.

Establish Public Protocols When Possible

For communicating with the outside world, establish protocols such as preferred methods of contact. As you communicate, be clear about how private or redistributable an e-mail is. For example, I include this line in my signature:

This e-mail is: [ ] bloggable [ x ] ask first [ ] private

Reply to E-mail by Blog

Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls once described blogging as "replying to my e-mails in public." Of course, you can't do that with every e-mail you get. But for the ones you can, you decrease the odds of answering the same question again and make your ideas discoverable. And while not everyone will blog, there are other public ways to share when appropriate.

Leverage Special-Purpose Social Software

Luis Suarez of IBM     (nyse:       IBM -        news     -            people     ) is  successfully replacing e-mail with social software. It's not just about reducing e-mail, but using Web sites to help you communicate efficiently and effectively. For example, LinkedIn is a better tool for referring new contacts. Dopplr is great for sharing travel plans. Flickr for sharing photos. Delicious for links.

As with private workspaces, these Web sites might create separate inboxes for you to manage. Ironically, for those who don't use advanced tools such as dashboards and newsreaders, the e-mail inbox becomes a place that notifies you about communications in other places. And that lets e-mail stick to what it does best.

Ross Mayfield is chairman, president and co-founder of Socialtext, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based social software company.