Coming back from a two week vacation (with a few holidays included in that span), i was greeted by 250 new email messages. I’m sure that’s on the lower end of the scale for some folks, although for me it’s a fair amount, even if about 100 of those turned out to be junk. So, i have 140 new, content-full, meaningful, possibly action-requiring, email messages in my inbox, waiting for my review.
Tagging all the emails belonging to this project or that project is a good way to get through the email landfill, as is focusing on the latest threads first and skimming over the rest to find offshoots & branches that didn’t quite develop into anything. Still, it took me a good 3 hours to go through all the updates and figure out where things are, after two weeks of not paying attention.
There is, of course, a better way… It does require a bit of a culture change, which immediately makes it an uphill battle, but hear me out.
What if, instead of sending out emails to the team, each individual team member updated (or sent an update email to) the project/team blog? In this beautiful utopian world of mine, all i’d have to do is open up the RSS reader for my project blogs, and have the evolution/storyline of my project unfold in front of my eyes as if i were reading the project’s diary (which, of course, is exactly what i would have been doing). There would have been no need to search my inbox for related messages, no need to waste time identifying messages i’ve already looked through as part of a newer message’s trail, categories would have been applied by authors for easier segmenting, and i probably would have spent less than half the time catching up on all the stuff that happened.
As a side benefit (and a major one), i would have had an online history of the project for all to view – instead of locking that history down in several mailboxen of individual team members. Of course, this history would have been keyword searcheable and could be integrated into project documentation (wiki) to make project data all the richer.
The blogging process can be made easier if the project blog were email-enabled. This way the familiar email becomes a tool in the new information radiation infrastructure, rather than remaining an instrument of information silos and mass document confusion. By the way, if any of you out there routinely use attachments to share document, i implore you to cease and desist. If your corporation doesn’t have a document management strategy, it needs to get into the 21st century, especially since 2009 is likely to favor companies that go after efficiency…
