Luis Suarez is free. In a recent article in the New York Times website he shared his story of how he cut down on his email dependency. Instead of email, he now uses tools offered by his company (IBM) and RSS feeds to connect with colleagues. He does have a point. Here are some interesting email stats that show just how pervasive email has become:
According to the EmailStatCenter:
- 274 is the average number of personal emails people receive weekly. – David Daniels, Vice President JupiterResearch (Dec. 2007)
- 304 is the average number of business emails received weekly. – David Daniels, Vice President JupiterResearch (Dec. 2007)
- 74% of email uses have 2 email accounts. – David Daniels, Vice President JupiterResearch (Dec. 2007)
- 87% of consumers’ online time is spent reading their emails. – David Daniels, Vice President JupiterResearch (Dec. 2007)
I advocate scheduling email time and limiting it to 2-3 times a day, but I don’t always take my own advice. Email is a compulsion. If you’re not quite sure what to work on, you can check your email. If you don’t want to tackle a task, you can put it off by checking your email.
But I would like to manage email better and I’m intrigued by Luis’ solution. Part of it is that I’m tired of handling old email. Some email just can’t be sorted. But in order for his ideas to work, others have to buy into it. In my case, I’d use instant messaging and Twitter. That means that other people I work with need to have the same IM service and sign up for Twitter.
The advantage that Luis has is that IBM has its own in-house networking system similar to Facebook. But even that becomes cumbersome for me because I have multiple “jobs”. As it is I belong to more social networks than I can handle. I don’t think I can manage joining several work-related networks as well.
Still, I think I’m going to figure out a way to make it work. But first I’m going to check my email.
