If you are receiving 300 email messages every day (and some people get a lot more than that), you are averaging a new message every 2 minutes over a 10 hour day. That's a completely unsustainable. No inbox-management or priority-inbox strategy is going to help.
Email is busted for a few reasons:
- Asymmetry of importance / urgency between the producer and consumer
- It is a single channel for everything
Any workable solution has to address these. For most people, they can only control what happens in their own organization, and so solutions should start there, and then (hopefully) move outside.
For background, check out this post and comments on Scott Porad's blog
To me the interesting discussion is about moving things out of email to channels that reflect their urgency and importance. This reduces email clutter, and allows people to engage with message streams in the way that makes sense for them.
Importance and Urgency: Four Quadrants
The shape of a solution starts with this chart, and respects the fact that a message may lie in one quadrant for the sender, and a different quadrant for the receiver. For broadcast messages different receivers may assign the message to different quadrants. Almost by definition, the same "subscription" process for everyone is a fail.
Separate Publishing Channels
A solution should allow for different types of channels depending on which quadrant the sender believes that a message falls into. Those channels might be an internal blog post, status update, chat-room message, or private chat / phone call.
Asking message creators to use separate channels has an advantage - it creates social pressure to avoid mixed quadrant messages like this one:
FYI ... so no action on X, but separately, I need immediate action on Y, oh yeah, how was poker night?
When you dig this up from your inbox after 3 weeks, it can be hard to remember which item was the action that caused you to save it.
Separate Subscription Channels
A solution should allow the receiver of the message to choose how they are going to receive it based on the importance and urgency they assign to the message.
This can't always work, especially when there is a mismatch between how the sender and receiver classify a message, but if that mismatch can be resolved quickly, and the message placed in the right channel, it seems like everyone benefits.
I'm still searching for the right answer, but here are a few things that I think do have great potential.
- A company-wide (or team wide) continuous chat session. This isolates the not-urgent and not-important, typically social communication. (Skype)
- Private chat or phone calls for urgent and important items. This creates a social pressure for the sender to decide if something really qualifies. (Skype)
- Internal tumblogs / activity streams for status updates. (SocialCast)
- Searchable shared document spaces for institutional knowledge. We used a private wiki, and I'm still not sure if that was effective, but it had the elements of the right solution. (PBWorks)
It's unclear to me if there is a single product to solve this, or if each company will choose a set of products to help them, but there is a real problem, and priority-inbox solutions are just band-aids, and activity streams can help, but don't actually create isolated channels.
What are other people using? If you have a tool you are using, I'm interested to hear which class of messages you have given over to that channel, and how effective it's been for you.
Someone is going to make a lot of money in this space, and it feels like there are breakthroughs waiting to happen.