The Washington Post published an article last Friday entitled “E-Mail Reply to All: ‘Leave Me Alone’”. The story picks up on a recent trend to declare “email bankruptcy”. Apparently, some people are so overwhelmed by the amount of unread and unanswered emails in their inbox that the only way out is to start over by deleting all accumulated messages and/or to declare an email moratorium.

The concept is not new and seems to date back to the early days of email.

“Stanford computer science professor Donald E. Knuth started using e-mail in 1975 and stopped using it 15 years later. Knuth said he prefers to concentrate on writing books rather than be distracted by the steady stream of communication.”

In recent weeks the topic resurfaced due to publicized statements from people like Fred Wilson, a NY based Venture Capitalist who blogs about technology. He posted this entry to his blog in April:

“I am so far behind on email that I am declaring bankruptcy.
If you’ve sent me an email (and you aren’t my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again.
I am starting over.”

The response to this declaration of defeat was mixed. Some people endorsed the idea and congratulated him on taking such a bold step, while others like Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor David J. Farber take issue:

“For a venture capitalist to say something like this — he should get out of the technology field.”

Wilson snipes back:

“That pisses me off. I am a hypercommunicator. I send and receive hundreds of emails a day, I blog incessantly, I instant message, text message, and twitter all the time, I do calls on my office phone, cell phone, and home phone all day and night. I bet I communicate at 10x the rate that David does. It’s exhausting frankly.”

And therein lies the problem. Over the last decade, we have turned into an information driven obsessed society where people are always connected and bombarded with input from many channels. While some are overloaded with email, others are addicted to IM or SMS. It’s not the medium that is at fault, but the way we use it. It is analogous to blaming your garage for being so full of junk that it prevents you from parking your car inside.

In the end, there is only so much information a human can consume. Frankly, I personally struggle following the multiple scrolling message banners framing the news anchor on CNN. Using the right tools and setting expectations of your communication preferences and response times may raise that threshold, but beware there is a limit.

Speaking of tools, there are a number of ways to improve email use and lighten the load:

  • Get a good multi-layered Spam defense. Any effort to organize your inbox will fail if too much Spam gets through.
  • Use different email addresses for specific purposes and establish the rules of engagement. Most people guard their cell phone number quite carefully, but carelessly share their primary email address. Instead, setup addresses for critical business (coworkers, partners, etc), personal (friends and family) and designate even more email aliases for specific projects. That way you can prioritize incoming traffic and not all email is being treated equal. Some existing solutions even automate the process.
  • Share the load: Discourage email use for team collaboration. Use blogs and blog comments, wikis and document sharing systems. Pick-up the phone, walk to somebody’s desk, IM and TXT if you like – just don’t use the one-fits-all approach for everything.
  • Most importantly let people know about your communication preferences and what response if any to expect.

Hypercommunicators like Fred Wilson will have to adjust to the reality of our human information processing limits and continue to flush the queues if things are starting to backup.

One additional point about the Washington Post article. DYS Analytics (a.k.a. Permessa) was quoted as an analysts firm, and while we are closely tracking the growth and usage patterns of enterprise communication through the solutions we have installed on some of the largest corporate messaging systems, we are not an analyst firm.

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