I use email for anything where you need a document trail, and for communications that can lead to a resolution in one or two rounds of messages. I use phone calls, IM, a handwritten note, leaving documents on someone's chair, or face-to-face for anything else. "Anything else" includes most things that matter. For example, giving feedback via email is generally not optimal.
The ancient Greeks taught their ambitious young men (not women, those were even more sexist times than we're in now) logic and rhetoric. Both were necessary in order to be effective. I learned to be more persuasive and more effective at emotionally engaging with my coworkers and customers because people are not solely motivated by logic when making decisions. Even people who regard themselves as entirely rational.
E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago
E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago It's being replaced by software that promotes real-time collaboration Darren Lennard is a managing director in the London offices of European-based investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. He became something of a creative-class everyman a month ago when, after a long and onerous day at the office, he plucked his hyperactive BlackBerry from his silk-lined pocket and proceeded to smash it on the gleaming granite countertop of his London home. As if an explanation is necessary. The analytically gifted investment banker had morphed into a zombie-faced thumb man, wheeling through his engorged in-box as his last activity before going to bed and his first upon waking. The time squandered on his electronic mistress made his brain reel. Of the 250 e-mails he received each day, he says "85% were totally not important to my job." Think that ratio of e-waste sounds depressing? It gets worse. Legitimate e-mail will drop to 8% this year, down from 12% last year, according to Redwood City (Calif.) e-mail filtering outfit Postini Inc. BLOW-OFF FACTOR What makes Lennard's e-mail outburst unique is that it was embraced by his superiors. J.P. Rangaswami, Dresdner's global chief information officer, is among a growing group of experts dedicated to slaying the unwieldy electronic blob. The cc: button? "Cover your asses," says Rangaswami, sounding less like a suit than a tattooed text punk. "...And bcc:, that's, like, almost evil. People can hide and have these sneaky little private conversations. Ludicrous!" Indeed, the onetime productivity wonder has turned into a maddening time waster. Despite the brawniest corporate filters, more than 60% of what swarms into corporate in-boxes is spam. Since so much of what's received involves scams about millions languishing in nonexistent bank accounts, interoffice status contests, and people plopping unwanted meetings onto Outlook calendars, the e-mail blow-off factor is rising. That's imperiling the medium's former dependability. In the long run, perhaps the biggest death knell for e-mail is the anthropological shift occurring among tomorrow's captains of industry, the text-messaging Netgens (16-to-24-year-olds), for whom e-mail is so "ovr," "dn," "w/e (over, done, whatever)." No surprise, then, that on Rangaswami's orders, e-mail at Dresdner is beginning to fade as the collaboration tool of choice. Instead, workers there, as well as at places like Walt Disney (DIS ), Eastman Kodak (EK ), Yahoo! (YHOO ), and even the U.S. military, are ditching e-mail in favor of other software tools that function as real-time virtual workspaces. Among them: private workplace wikis (searchable, archivable sites that allow a dedicated group of people to comment on and edit one another's work in real time); blogs (chronicles of thoughts and interests); Instant Messenger (which enables users to see who is online and thus chat with them immediately rather than send an e-mail and wait for a response); RSS (really simple syndication, which lets people subscribe to the information they need); and more elaborate forms of groupware such as Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT ) SharePoint, which allows workers to create Web sites for teams' use on projects.
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