The Productivity Perils of Email

Doug Cornelius has a thoughtful post up today about early 20th century Boston political boss Martin Michael Lomasney, who famously said:

“Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.”

Doug uses this quote as a jumping off point to smartly advise:

“Now every email is subject to ending up in a lawyer’s hand during a law suit.  Think before you hit that send button. Maybe a phone conversation will be better. Or a nod.”

This point is also well taken when thinking about the tremendous productivity drain resulting from email.  With the advent of word processing, people envisioned paperless offices.  Instead, word processing has been abused to produce more paper documents than anyone ever dreamed of decades ago.  Email operates similarly.  The convenience of near instantaneous correspondence drives people to send enormously greater volumes of messages, including “for your information” emails, requests without any context, demands without a signature line, and many vague, ambiguous and rambling remarks.

Not only does this behavior create a litany of evidence that can be used to paint an unflattering (and inaccurate) picture of a defendant, but the time spent deciphering all of these messages, as well the additional back and forth correspondence caused by doing so, takes many hours away from each business day.

This point makes me think about the massive cost of electronic discovery due to email. Many clients I’ve worked with over the years imposed sharp limits on the storage size of their employees’ email accounts residing on the shared server. Because employees are addicted to generating voluminous amounts of email, IT departments allow them to archive their email on their hard drive to get around the size limits. In a large, multinational company, with tens of thousands of employees, that means tens of thousands of hard drives would need to be searched and scoured to fully comply with an e-discovery request. The size and cost of such an effort (a completely preventable effort, bear in mind), is mind boggling.

A good guideline to follow with email is to use it mainly as an information extraction technique: define a goal as to what exact information you need from the recipient, clearly state the question, and send it.

Otherwise, don’t.

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