I have advanced this idea to several people and it is usually dismissed quicker than most American Idol contestants.
We all complain about too much e-mail. The cure is simple and based on the principle of scarcity.
Since there is no consequence to the sender if they launch 1 or 1,000 e-mails, and send them to 1 or 1,000 different recipients.. they fire away, and away, and away.
I recommend that everyone is given a weekly quota of e-mail to introduce the prioritization that occurs when your resources are not unlimited.
Let's say I had 100 as my weekly quota. I could chose to send 1 e-mail to 100 people or 100 e-mails to different individuals... but when I am out - I am out. The best part of this approach is that I am forced to really evaluate how important it is to me to send 50 of my closest friends a picture of a cat in a sombrero.
This could introduce other neat market elements, like "e-mail eBay" where I could sell of some of my excess weekly e-mails to the communication challenged.
Any other approach requires you to depend on the judgement of others - and we all know we are smart, but those dang "others" just never seem to get it.
While I like what the quota approach could do in to improve corporate efficiency, it does sound somewhat socialist to me. Controlling communication through quotas is a little less than a free market approach, don't you think?
ReplyDeleteA more market-based alternative to a strict quota is to charge a fee for e-mail -- e.g., 15 minutes' worth of the recipient's pay. (Presumably that fee would come out of the team's budget and go into the recipients' teams' budgets.)
ReplyDeleteOr you can simply track how many e-mails everyone sends (and to how many recipients) and post that information publically. Social pressure works, and without nickel-and-diming everyone.
mmadsen@crainc.com