{"id":2703,"date":"2011-05-23T14:00:19","date_gmt":"2011-05-23T13:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2703"},"modified":"2012-05-28T10:54:18","modified_gmt":"2012-05-28T09:54:18","slug":"some-thoughts-on-modern-communications-and-avoiding-the-time-hoover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2011\/05\/some-thoughts-on-modern-communications-and-avoiding-the-time-hoover.htm","title":{"rendered":"Some thoughts on modern communications and avoiding the “time-Hoover”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I was reading an article by Shelley Portet looking at how poor productivity and rudeness are influenced by technology interruptions at work<\/a>. As someone who’s just managed to escape from email jail yet again (actually, I’m on parole – my inbox may finally be at zero but I still have hundreds of items requiring action) I have to say that, despite all the best intentions, experience shows that I’m a repeat offender, an habitual email mis-manager – and email is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.<\/p>\n

Nowadays email is just one of many forms of communication: there’s instant messaging; “web 2.0″\u009d features on intranet sites (blogs, wikis, discussion forums); our internal social networking platform; business and personal use of external social networks (Twitter, LinkedIn, Slideshare, YouTube, Facebook… the list goes on) – so how can we prepare our knowledge workers for dealing with this barrage of interruptions?<\/p>\n

There are various schools of thought on email management and I find that Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero principles work well (see this video from Merlin Mann’s Google Tech Talk<\/a> using these slides on action-based email<\/a> – or flick through the Michael Reynolds version for the highlights<\/a>), as long as one always manages to process to zero (that’s the tricky part that lands me back in email jail).<\/p>\n

The trouble is that Inbox Zero only deals with the manifestation of the problem, not the root cause: people. Why do we send these messages? And how do we act on them?<\/p>\n

A couple of colleagues have suggested recently that the trouble with email is that people confuse sending an email with completing an action as if, somehow, the departure of the message from someone’s outbox on its way to someone else’s inbox implies a transfer of responsibility. Except that it doesn’t – there are many demands on my colleagues’ time and it’s up to me to ensure that we’re all working towards a common goal. I can help by making my expectations clear; I can think carefully before carbon copying or replying to all; I can make sure I’m brief and to the point (but not ambiguous) – but those are all items of email etiquette. They don’t actually help to reduce the volumes of messages sent and received. Incidentally, I’m using email as an example here – many of the issues are common whatever the communications medium (back to handwritten letters and typed memos as well as forwards to social networking) but, ultimately I’m either trying to:<\/p>\n