When To Use (And Not To Use) E-Mail And Boost Personal Productivity

Don Tapscott, co-author of "wikinomics" and the man who made the phrase "paradigm shift" popular in the 1990s, was keynote speaker at a meeting organised by Accenture in Orlando, Florida in April 2008. He had also invited a member of the generation Y cohort to talk about communications in front of a selection of client representatives. Tapscott asked this youngster, point blank: "What are you using e-mail for?" 

• Tip #4: knowing when to stop can be handy. No e-mails should be sent late at night. This is not proving that you are a dedicated professional, but rather that you are badly organised. Actually, if you were working at Microsoft for instance, the system would not even let you do this since it is considered inappropriate behaviour to write e-mails outside of business hours (messages are therefore queued by the system during these periods, also to avoid people who work across time zones to become the slaves of their e-mail box),
• Tip #5: to avoid receiving too many messages, just don't send too many either. As a consequence, also use mobile e-mail to sort out, read and (mostly) delete messages (and not so much to send more e-mails, which in their turn will generate more replies),
• Tip #6: e-mail messages longer than two paragraphs should not be written (to that end, I would recommend you also read Joe Robinson's e-tool bill of rights,
• Tip #7: if you are using Outlook, avoid the 'send immediately when connected' option at all cost. In case you press the button too fast, you will always be able to retrieve the message before it is processed by the server,
• Tip #8: avoid leaving your mailbox open all day long. It is actually best to devote special time for e-mail usage rather than using it on a continuous basis, since this is very disruptive. If what you are after in instantaneous, synchronous communications, instant messaging and also the good old telephone is much preferable to e-mail,
• Tip #9: complex messages should always be given time. If you receive a message longer than 2 paragraphs, there are many chances that a quick phone call or an instant message might solve the issue in a much better way than a long-winded written complex response,
• Tip #10: activity reporting has to be transparent, accessible and updated. E-mail is inappropriate when it comes to send reports and status updates because such reports cannot be allowed to sit in anyone's e-mail. All project members need to be able to access, or even update, the status report themselves. I see too many people using e-mail as a repository for important files which would be best kept on a wiki for instance. E-mail is an inappropriate system as a repository. Instead wikis should be used or Sharepoint spaces, Google docs, or similar enterprise technologies such as bluekiwi,
• Tip #11: never ever use e-mail to set up meetings unless coupled with an Outlook calendar (and flagging your meeting as "tentative") or unless you have been able to talk to the participants beforehand. I have a much better idea for you: it is a Swiss applet, and God knows the Swiss are competent when it comes to time management. Use http://doodle.ch to invite people to meetings or even directly within Facebook by adding the doodle applet to your Facebook profile. You will save dozens of useless e-mail messages and will have improved your productivity dramatically,
• Tip #12: writing contracts or performing other complex tasks which involve several participants is not compatible with the asynchronous model of e-mail messaging. Various revisions will thus be sent via e-mail and pile up in your in-tray and you will spend many an hour trying to reconcile the differences. This is not an efficient way of doing business. Instead, web conferencing should be used in order to enable people to work together on the same document and update it in real-time,
• Tip #13: sending large files and bulky attached files is not always a good option. Most of the time, it is far more effective to store the files on a wiki and embed a link to this file within your e-mail message,
• Tip #14: avoid asking open or complex questions via e-mail. If your message requires a very complex response, writing an email might take a long time and chances are that the respondent will be discouraged when he sees your message. First resort to IM to probe your colleague and if your first filtering questions still find no simple answers, you had better call him or her by phone,
• Tip #15: keep all personal e-mails in a separate mailbox, and preferably not on your laptop or desktop (use webmail instead). No personal e-mail should ever be sent from your professional mailbox (it's not just a matter of productivity, but also a matter of protecting your privacy).

As a conclusion, remember to use collaborative and synchronous technologies each time interaction and/or transparency is needed or when reporting and complexity are involved. E-mail can be very useful but if it is wrongly used, it could easily have a negative impact on your productivity.

you can read more about bad e-mail usage in the workplace by going to:

• 12 worst practices of e-mail usage in the workplace
• The Hamster Revolution.
• Joe Robinson's e-tool bill of rights
• a study on the ROI of web conferencing which demonstrates the benefit of using collaborative technologies

(*) in 2006, 99.43% of interviewees of the Microsoft survey were using e-mail on a permanent basis (2250 interviewees, survey carried out by sociologist Richard Collin on behalf of Microsoft)

(**) 24% of interviewed professionals in a 2006 Microsoft survey were using IM; between September and October 2008, 63% of the respondents at an Orange group declared they were using IM professionally and 43% at home (source: internal Orange Business survey, over a sample made of 795 interviewees).