i read a very interesting article in the A2 Section of The Age on Saturday 22/9/07. a major European merchant bank made a business decision to stop use email, they determined that “junk’ email sent between employees was wasting significant amount of time. they chose to use a wiki as their sole collaborative communication tool. http://www.theage.com.au/news/essential-gadgets/when-the-inbox-is-on-the-outer/
2007/09/19/1190486197735.html [20070925]
today when looking through my feed of new computer titles from James Bennett I came up with this book:
Johnson, Paul Email Survival Guide. The Book Guild: Lewes, UK
9781846241604 / 184624160X Nov 07 ARP $34.95
blurb: warning! email at work can seriously damage your health. is email at work taking over your life? this guide is written for everyone who wants to take back control. It show you how! it is the only book covering best practice ‘netiquette’ as well as being a valuable ‘how-to’.
3 responses so far ↓
Rebecca // September 26, 2007 at 06:50 |
Hi Jane
The email gurus tell you to check your email only once or twice a day (in the morning and at the end of the day) and to turn off all notification messages during the day so they don’t interrupt your workflows. This is all very well as long as your workplace has other means of communicating, and that it uses them!
For example, what if I checked my email when I got in at 9am, then ITS sent me an urgent email at 11am to say that they would be switching off my PC at precisely 16:31 and I would need to save all open documents before then … I’d wonder why my screen went blank with (seemingly) no prior warning an hour and a half before I was due to go home.
I think our staff wiki is a great resource, and has certainly limited the amount of email traffic needed to communicate the location of documents in the G Drive black hole. However, I can’t see how wiki technology can efficiently communicate news and updates as they happen. For this purpose, a blog would be better.
Thanks for the interesting article, Jane!
paul johnson // October 16, 2007 at 21:21 |
Hi Jane
I’m afraid I’m responsible for the Email Survival Guide… It was the product of too many years facing an increasing onslaught of business email. Rebecca makes a good point, you have to be careful with many of the recommendations made about how to handle email. Everybody and every organisation is different and you have to control your own email style and approach according to your characteristics and the environment you operate in.
I thought it would be useful to put down a few ideas or suggestions in the book. The hope is that people can read the book and pick up a few ideas that same them time and stress. But you can’t be too prescriptive, it wouldn’t work.
I’ve set up a website for the book at http://www.survive-email.com and am collecting feedback comments on business email etc through there.
By the way type in “email stress” into your search engine and you will get some interesting articles about recent Scottish research into email use at work.
Regards
Paul
janew13 // October 18, 2007 at 09:23 |
I’m so excited! I believe that this is the first random comment to my 23 things blog. Even if Paul Johnson, the author of the book Email survival guide used a web crawler or bot to find the original post on my blog, his comment seems individually written.
His tips for email usage on the site http://www.survive-email.com could well be applied to using FaceBook in the work environment. The freaky this is I earmakred this book for purchase in 2008 when I saw it in a recent Bennett’s New Title list.