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#1 Jan 13 2012 at 3:14 PM Rating: Good
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Eighteen months from now Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos—one of the largest information technology companies in the world, plans to have eliminated email as a communication and collaboration medium within his company. “If people want to talk to me, call or send me a text message,” said Breton. “Emails cannot replace the spoken word.”

According to an article written by Peter Allen in the Daily Mail, Atos’ nearly 80,000 employees in 42 countries will have stopped using email eighteen months from now and will have replaced it with social media tools, the telephone and face-to-face conversations. Should you read this and assume that Breton is a 30-something young maverick trying to make a statement, you’d be wrong. The 56-year old chief executive is the former French finance minister who believes that only 20 out of every 200 emails received by his staff every day turn out to be important.

“[E]mail is no longer the appropriate tool,” said Breton. “It is time to think differently.”

Breton cites a number of examples of how email wastes time including:

1.The “deluge” of information that plagues organizations
2.The need to review “useless” emails and the time it takes to get focused again on important tasks
3.The “pile” of email that employees end up sorting through after hours and the associated drain on employees’ personal time
What’s more “Mr. Breton pointed to a recent study by the business watchdog ORSE, which reads: Reading useless messages is terrible for concentration, as it takes 64 seconds to get back on the ball after doing so,” writes Allen. “Poorly controlled, the e-mail can become a devastating tool.”


I saw this article a while back, and found the concept a little facinating. I've often said there's too much waste in email, particularly the way some people use it. I know that roughly 3/4 of email I get, if not more, has no direct impact in communicating anything worthwhile to me in my job. If I were to eliminate all that traffic, it would save me at least some time and productivity (as I sit here with the Asylum on one tab and Facebook on the other).

How about you? Would you Shit a brick if you had to go without email at work? Would IM, texting, phone, and face to face be enough?
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#2 Jan 13 2012 at 3:17 PM Rating: Good
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Practically speaking, it would be nigh impossible to effectively communicate with people around the world, distribute documents, and reach multiple contacts efficiently without it.

Also, there are some people I just downright don't want to talk to live.
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#3 Jan 13 2012 at 3:20 PM Rating: Good
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Who reviews "useless" emails?
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#4 Jan 13 2012 at 3:23 PM Rating: Excellent
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lolgaxe wrote:
Who reviews "useless" emails?


Sometimes it hard to tell the difference. So we just got our weekly newsletter at work. They said it might snow Saturday and we should be prepared.

Smiley: disappointed
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#5 Jan 13 2012 at 3:24 PM Rating: Excellent
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I get too many emails with (relevant) documents attached.
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#6 Jan 13 2012 at 3:24 PM Rating: Good
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Demea wrote:
Practically speaking, it would be nigh impossible to effectively communicate with people around the world, distribute documents, and reach multiple contacts efficiently without it.

Also, there are some people I just downright don't want to talk to live.



You don't use Sharepoint? Though I can't argue with your second part. Dealing with accents can be troublesome as well. My boss is French, and it's a little tricky understanding him on the phone sometimes.
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#7 Jan 13 2012 at 3:30 PM Rating: Good
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and will have replaced it with social media tools


I suppose that this could fill many of the same roles that email could, particularly with communiques within the company. Still seems like a dumb idea though, and I'd wager that his employees will just find other ways to waste their time.

Email isn't inherently necessary for what I do, but it'd still have to be supplanted by a good FTP method. I need to get large CAD and document files to people in electronic form, one way or the other.

As far as spam/wasteful emails go, it's not an issue for me, and I don't understand how it's an issue for anyone who has even a rudimentary knowledge of the medium. Spam gets filtered, and I set up new filters for anything that isn't covered by default. If friends send me junk, I tell them not to. I don't sign up for mailing lists unless I'm absolutely certain that I want something from them.

I get about 10-20 work emails a day, and probably about 4-6 personal ones. Granted, I'm still very low on the totem pole, but I don't foresee it ever being a real problem. My fiance gets like 100+ emails in her personal inbox a day, and is completely overwhelmed. But that's all because she gives out her email too frequently.
#8 Jan 13 2012 at 3:32 PM Rating: Decent
Even the spam filters don't hold it all out anymore at work, still, it saves on paper and it can be handy when, like Demea said, you really don't want to speak to someone. Email's are easier, at least I don't have to listen to someone else going on about their lives when I just do not care.
#9 Jan 13 2012 at 4:25 PM Rating: Good
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I thought this was going to be about Google blacking out the 18th. Well, possibly blacking out, it's not confirmed yet as far as I know.
#10 Jan 13 2012 at 5:14 PM Rating: Good
First, I thought it was funny that Mr. Breton says "If people want to talk to me, call or send me a text message," then went on to say that "emails cannot replace the spoken word." Smiley: facepalm

Second, at my old job, emails were a nice way to document things. If someone calls me and says, "Yes, I'll have that check out to you," then two weeks later says, "I never said that!!" when his boss is telling him to hold the check, it's nice to have an email you can send to said boss and demand payment.
#11 Jan 13 2012 at 6:46 PM Rating: Excellent
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This seems like an "interesting" endeavor, but I'm not sure how useful it'll end out being. Seems more like a gimmick than anything else. While I suppose you could transfer docs using some kind of sharepoint or similar system, it's still going to be cumbersome. So someone sends you a text message saying "I dropped that document you wanted in <some location>", and then you go grab it? Is that really easier than an email with said document attached right there?

If the problem is actual spam, then that's an issue with how people handle their own email. But if the problem is with too much email being sent out to too many people, all you're really doing is shifting that messaging system to something else that's even less capable of managing the load than email readers are. Pretty much any email reader has functions for sorting email by a wide assortment of criteria. Most phones and pda type devices really don't.


The reason people get too much email in a large business environment is because people want to have access to information if they need it, but don't actually need it most of the time. So I might receive updates of a whole host of different things going on around me which *might* affect me. 90% of the time, they don't, but I still want to have received that notification/information/whatever for the occasional times when they do. Email handles this situation very well. Other messaging systems do not.


I suspect this little experiment will fail. Just my opinion of course.
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#12 Jan 13 2012 at 7:05 PM Rating: Good
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Belkira wrote:
First, I thought it was funny that Mr. Breton says "If people want to talk to me, call or send me a text message," then went on to say that "emails cannot replace the spoken word." Smiley: facepalm


I was going to say something about this. Since there is no difference between a Text Message and an Email. Just the destination. One is sent to a phone address, the other sent to an email address.

Emails are important for me. I can write up an email in 5 minutes that explains in great detail what I want/need when I request a quote from a supplier. Or I can call them, leave a message in their voice mailbox, wait for them to call me back, but since I'm out on the floor working, I am not at my desk so they leave me a message, then when I finally am at my desk or they are at their desk, I can spend 15-20 minutes doing a back and forth about what they want from me and what I want from them.

Emails provide me a way to get lots of information to people who are not always available at the time you are. I spent this whole week fixing problems with a huge machine that decided to stop working. I was able to send out emails to a company I was working with for another project late at night when I finally stopped working and they were able to get that information in the morning when I was back at work already elbow deep in another machine. They are an excellent replacement for the spoken word when composed correctly.

Also, they are especially helpful when sending information between people who are not fluent in the same languages. If I type up an email and use good grammar and correct spelling, and send it to a person in Germany who cannot speak English (well or at all), they can understand what I'm saying without having to sit down and spend half an hour on the phone. I've dealt with a number of people who work in Germany who have ended up asking for an email instead because of the language barrier.
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#13 Jan 13 2012 at 7:18 PM Rating: Good
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Belkira wrote:
Second, at my old job, emails were a nice way to document things.

1000x this. I work in student housing at a state university. I can't count the number of times that residents or coworkers have tried to say that they didn't get important information. All I have to do is pull out my phone and I can search my emails really fast to find the one they ignored. Can't really do that with vocal communication.
#14 Jan 13 2012 at 10:26 PM Rating: Excellent
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How is a text message less distracting than an email?

Most of the emails I send are either answers to direct questions, or suggestions to get together and talk about the subject in depth. Whether that happens over the phone or in person depends on where they are geographically.

Most of the emails I get are trashed with no further action. Maybe a quarter are filed for later reference. Some are answered as above.

I will say this for the emails I receive, though: 95% of them are written in readable English. If I get a communication I can't easily interpret, I dump it. I can imagine a lot of urgent business texts getting trashed out of hand.

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#15 Jan 13 2012 at 10:33 PM Rating: Good
We use emails to augment our ticket tracking system.

We have three methods of clients giving us tickets: The "oh **** help me" emergency help desk line, which MUST be answered or else we are in such deep dookey it isn't even funny, emails for not-quite-so-dire situations, and the casual "walk through" that the account executive (all one of him) does once a week for each client site, poking users and checking in on them and stuff.

Eliminating emails within the company would work, except we CC our support account on every email we sent to clients as well, and ask them to cc the support account too. We use it to track conversation threads between us and the client that don't necessary need to go in our ticket database, like between the client and a different third party vendor that affects us (usually software providers, or utilities, etc.)

#16 Jan 14 2012 at 2:07 PM Rating: Good
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Samira wrote:
How is a text message less distracting than an email?


Yeah, that's one of the problems I have with it as well. An IM or text seems to me to require an immediate response. Being interrupted continuously would drive me nuts. At least with email, you can ignore it for several hours at a stretch, and go to it when you have time.
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#17 Jan 14 2012 at 4:29 PM Rating: Decent
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Honestly, I get what he's talking about, and yet the reason is his management's fault, not the service's.

At my work, we get on average 4-8 emails per day, and 3-7 of them could never exist and no one would care. So-and-so has been promoted to such and such, here's a newsletter of old posts, please be aware of this thing everyone is already aware of and probably 3 people need direct reminding of....

In the end, shoot the messager writer, not the messager delivery service.

Edit: Keep in mind I am in the role of Lowly Peon. I can only imagine the amount of spam someone who is actually in charge of somethign must receive in this company.

Edited, Jan 14th 2012 5:36pm by Pawkeshup
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#18 Jan 14 2012 at 5:18 PM Rating: Excellent
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Four to eight a day? I get dozens. Lots of people get hundreds.

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#19 Jan 14 2012 at 5:40 PM Rating: Decent
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It was more the fact that I get one legitimately needed email per day, rather than the volume.

If you want volume...

At Dell, I averaged about 40-60 a day. Needless to say I had a sh*tton of sorting and autodeletion rules in place. My manager averaged about 300. His manager got so many, he could never send email because the client locked down due to inability to save an outgoing email.

At Dell, there was a larger percentage of actual valid info. My point was that there is vast abuse of email for pointless spam unless people are made aware that no one @#%^ing cares who gets promoted where in reality, and that if we wanted to view old news, we all have the website mandatorily set as our home page...

Edit:

Literally, pointless emails. One day I received 6 emails, three in english, three french, all linking back to the news page to articles linked on that page. All sent by the same person. All in a 10 minute span. Really? Why not make one email with three links and call it a day.

Edited, Jan 14th 2012 6:43pm by Pawkeshup
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#20 Jan 14 2012 at 7:05 PM Rating: Default
Samira wrote:
Four to eight a day? I get dozens. Lots of people get hundreds.


Yeah, haha, I get a million emails a day.

A million.

Because lots of people want to talk to me, all the time.
#21 Jan 14 2012 at 7:11 PM Rating: Excellent
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Quote:
One day I received 6 emails, three in english, three french, all linking back to the news page to articles linked on that page. All sent by the same person. All in a 10 minute span. Really? Why not make one email with three links and call it a day.


I would block that person so fast his head would spin.

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#22 Jan 14 2012 at 7:41 PM Rating: Decent
At Dell I averaged about 100 a day. Most were from engineers wanting something teated or finished. Then there were the upper managers screaming for their special projects to be released to production. On top of the even higher ups yelling about them. You had to sort by importance and file them every day. What a pain.
#23 Jan 14 2012 at 11:56 PM Rating: Good
We had a client forward one of those "A guy died in a car crash in South America leaving millions and we've selected YOU as his next of kin!" emails to my boss with the message, "Do you think I should contact this lawyer?"

#24 Jan 15 2012 at 11:51 AM Rating: Good
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Eliminate "Reply All" and you'd solve most of the issues with too much e-mail traffic.
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#25 Jan 15 2012 at 12:06 PM Rating: Excellent
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Belkira wrote:
We had a client forward one of those "A guy died in a car crash in South America leaving millions and we've selected YOU as his next of kin!" emails to my boss with the message, "Do you think I should contact this lawyer?"




This is the sort of thing that makes me despair.
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#26 Jan 15 2012 at 2:05 PM Rating: Excellent
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Uglysasquatch wrote:
Eliminate "Reply All" and you'd solve most of the issues with too much e-mail traffic.
I liked the single email that multiple people can see idea that google wave was trying to be for a bit. It worked really well for multi person planning.
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