Email schmemail...

[Adam L Beberg]

The cold hard facts are coming in... except in tightly controlled
situations, email is no longer a net gain in productivity. Neither is
IM. This guy deserves a medal...

"Hey, we figured out we don't have to outsource all of your jobs to
India if you stop wasting 7 hours a day playing with the computer and
do your jobs."

Oh, and another massive virus is out messing up the net and clogging
pipes again. W32.Swen.A...

- Adam L. Beberg - ***@mithral.com
http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/

-------------

Deluged Telecoms Boss Bans Staff E-Mails
By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent

LONDON (Reuters) - The owner of one of Britain's biggest mobile phone
chains has declared war on e-mail, banning staff from sending
electronic missives to co-workers in a move he says will save the
company millions of pounds each year.

"We have e-mail paralysis," John Caudwell, the owner of the high
street retailer Phones4U, told Reuters on Friday. "If you have a cancer
you have to cut it out. That's what I've done."

Caudwell, who described himself as a slow typer who has yet to send an
e-mail on his own, introduced the measure this week because staff were
spending too much time with internal e-mails rather than dealing with
customers.

He calculated three hours per day off e-mail multiplied by the number
of staff affected by the ban (600-700) multiplied by the average
employee wage will translate to monthly savings of 1 million pounds
($1.63 million).

"The policy came from me. The staff was initially slightly shocked
that I should make such a revolutionary move," he said.

Customers can still e-mail product questions to staff, but for
managers and staff at the 341 branches the privilege is history.

Bulging e-mail in-boxes is a daily headache for corporate drones. But
while e-mail fatigue is often cited as a modern-day workplace
distraction, few could conceive of life without it.

TPG, a Dutch mail express and logistics company with over 150,000
staff in 62 countries, has a typical love-hate relationship with e-mail.

"It would be a serious setback for the company if we could no longer
use email, and we are not considering it," said Tanno Massar, director
of media relations at TPG.

"E-mail has its own qualities, it's very fast and you can inform many
people at the same time. That is something you cannot match with face
to face meetings," Tanno added.

There is one notable exception to Caudwell's ban. The company's lone
communications manager has the task of compiling reports from 40
company managers and writing a daily e-mail distributed to the
company's 2,500 employees.

(Additional reporting by Wendel Broere in Amsterdam)

[Gregory Alan Bolcer]

That's funny. Blame the messenger instead of the
incompetent IT staff.

In 2002, IT staff spent $48.90/email user
In 2003, IT staff spent $165.53/email user

IT staff spends 8.9 IT hours a week per 1000
email users resetting passwords.

With the introduction of IM, the typical user has
reduced email use by 12.6%, telephone use by 14.4%,
fax by 11.3% and travel by 13.4%.

So in terms of real dollars and real productivity,
your story doesn't quite have a big enough
statistical sample. I'm going to have to
go with the Gartner, Osterman, Chela, and Yankee,
Forrester numbers on email and IM instead of yours.

Greg


[1] A Survey Conducted by Osterman Research, Inc.
Conducted January 7-17, 2003
© 2003 Osterman Research, Inc. All rights reserved.

Post by Adam L Beberg
The cold hard facts are coming in... except in tightly controlled
situations, email is no longer a net gain in productivity. Neither is
IM. This guy deserves a medal...
"Hey, we figured out we don't have to outsource all of your jobs to
India if you stop wasting 7 hours a day playing with the computer and do
your jobs."
Oh, and another massive virus is out messing up the net and clogging
pipes again. W32.Swen.A...
http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/
-------------
Deluged Telecoms Boss Bans Staff E-Mails
By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent
LONDON (Reuters) - The owner of one of Britain's biggest mobile phone
chains has declared war on e-mail, banning staff from sending electronic
missives to co-workers in a move he says will save the company millions
of pounds each year.
"We have e-mail paralysis," John Caudwell, the owner of the high street
retailer Phones4U, told Reuters on Friday. "If you have a cancer you
have to cut it out. That's what I've done."
Caudwell, who described himself as a slow typer who has yet to send an
e-mail on his own, introduced the measure this week because staff were
spending too much time with internal e-mails rather than dealing with
customers.
He calculated three hours per day off e-mail multiplied by the number
of staff affected by the ban (600-700) multiplied by the average
employee wage will translate to monthly savings of 1 million pounds
($1.63 million).
"The policy came from me. The staff was initially slightly shocked that
I should make such a revolutionary move," he said.
Customers can still e-mail product questions to staff, but for managers
and staff at the 341 branches the privilege is history.
Bulging e-mail in-boxes is a daily headache for corporate drones. But
while e-mail fatigue is often cited as a modern-day workplace
distraction, few could conceive of life without it.
TPG, a Dutch mail express and logistics company with over 150,000 staff
in 62 countries, has a typical love-hate relationship with e-mail.
"It would be a serious setback for the company if we could no longer
use email, and we are not considering it," said Tanno Massar, director
of media relations at TPG.
"E-mail has its own qualities, it's very fast and you can inform many
people at the same time. That is something you cannot match with face to
face meetings," Tanno added.
There is one notable exception to Caudwell's ban. The company's lone
communications manager has the task of compiling reports from 40 company
managers and writing a daily e-mail distributed to the company's 2,500
employees.
(Additional reporting by Wendel Broere in Amsterdam)
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[Adam L Beberg]

Post by Gregory Alan Bolcer
IT staff spends 8.9 IT hours a week per 1000
email users resetting passwords.

That's stupid users, not bad IT staff.

Post by Gregory Alan Bolcer
With the introduction of IM, the typical user has
reduced email use by 12.6%, telephone use by 14.4%,
fax by 11.3% and travel by 13.4%.

I agree completely. Employees have cut back on talking to customers,
faxing customers, and traveling to see customers to IM their friends.

Don't try to pretend you don't know that.

- Adam L. Beberg - ***@mithral.com
http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/

[Stephen D. WIlliams]

People have cut back on time spent talking to customers, faxing
customers, traveling to customers, and dictating letters to secretaries
to customers. (Most of you don't really know what secretaries were...)

That doesn't mean, necessarily, that people have cut back on actual
effectiveness of talking to customers, fax-equivalents, traveling or
equivalent (VTC, collaborative spaces), etc.

The thing that people seem to forget is that people have always had
personal interruptions, need to make appointments, discuss plans, etc.
People were Always on the phone making personal phone calls, that was
over half the point of having your own phone in a workspace. For a
while, IT shops would forbid personal use of email and, of course IM,
because of some idea of wasting company resources, but that was just
trading the use of a very efficient, and a
more-you-use-it-the-cheaper-it-gets resource for phone service which has
always been a hard cash expense. It used to be that every phone call to
or from any commercial business cost $0.08 and there were no flat rates
for business. I'm sure that it's different, but it still is expensive
comparitively, not even considering long distance.

If you studied the overhead of an average interruption of various types,
you would find that IM interruptions are very efficient, email next,
phone would be pretty bad, and of course in-person (lunch, meetings,
travel) is astronomical. There are of course differences in both people
and task types that give different results for multitasking, task
switching, multiple communication threads, etc.

A telecom executive that has yet to send an email message? Yea, he's in
touch. If he doesn't do it, it must not be worth doing or contribute
anything to the work effort. At least he's not fit to judge whether it
does or not. At least some of those messages were work related and it's
certainly not going to be more efficient to generate a stack of memos,
route them via inter-office mail, and call meetings constantly. I think
it's safe to say that this company will not now rocket to the top of the
market due to its new found efficiency.

sdw

Post by Adam L Beberg

Post by Gregory Alan Bolcer
IT staff spends 8.9 IT hours a week per 1000
email users resetting passwords.

That's stupid users, not bad IT staff.

Post by Gregory Alan Bolcer
With the introduction of IM, the typical user has
reduced email use by 12.6%, telephone use by 14.4%,
fax by 11.3% and travel by 13.4%.

I agree completely. Employees have cut back on talking to customers,
faxing customers, and traveling to see customers to IM their friends.
Don't try to pretend you don't know that.
http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/
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FoRK mailing list
http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork

[Jim Whitehead]

I'm starting to think Don Knuth has the right idea:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

Email (let's drop the hyphen)

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an
email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15
years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of
things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do
takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to
learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest
that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time
for such study.

On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over
the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people
who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this
communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every three
months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use good ol'
snail mail and send a letter to the following address:

...

- Jim

[Gregory Alan Bolcer]

Post by Jim Whitehead
Email (let's drop the hyphen)

I don't know anyone outside of CNN that
ever used it hyphenated.

Greg

[Joe Barrera]

Post by Gregory Alan Bolcer
I don't know anyone outside of CNN that
ever used it hyphenated.

I saw it hyphenated when I was at C-MU.

- Joe

[Adam L Beberg]

Post by Jim Whitehead
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer
had an
email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me
that 15
years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

Indeed. I've been phone-less for months now. It's GREAT, no more random
interruptions when I don't want them.... from the phone anyway.

Working on the email, which quite frankly, is overwhelming even the
many layers of filtering I'm using, I'd say it's grown to 2-3x even the
insane numbers I posted several months ago, which puts the spam in the
98%+ range. As soon as I find a job, I may switch to hardcore whitelist
mode. Unfortunately sending NACK's is not an options tho, so I'll
probably post a web form where you can request to be whitelisted. My IM
programs are already all in (very short) whitelist modes.

But still, I get interrupted by _something_ every 10, 15 minutes at the
most, even at 3AM.

Unplugging from the world is really the only option left. So many
people are burned out to the brink of total breakdown (looks like we
lost the whore), and it's not getting any better.

- Adam L. Beberg - ***@mithral.com
http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/

[Elias]

[...] Unplugging from the world is really the only option left.

Plugging in, literally, is where it's going. No more coping with that
slow and innefficient meat-layer getting in the way of our information
processing - leave it for eating, drinking, running, jumping,
appreciating music, deep discussions with old chums and, of course, love
making among other things. Give me broadband for my brain, a fiber trunk
to my neocortex, wetware to satisfy my virtual thirst and a wet nurse
who'll take care of me so that I won't need to unplug before I'm ready.
Give me software agents to manage my schedule, make my travel plans and
prioritize my communications. Give me sharp electronic eyes and let me
surf the info skies...


Elias

[Adam L Beberg]

Post by Elias
Give me software agents to manage my schedule, make my travel plans
and prioritize my communications. Give me sharp electronic eyes and
let me surf the info skies...

You have it completely backwards. Give me agents and robots and AI so I
don't NEED to schedule, travel for work, talk to telemarketers, read
spam, or watch commercials.

We're under full assault from the second we wake up to overflowing
inboxes and phones and every other form of sensory (read: stress)
overload.

People forget the whole point of technology is so we can do LESS work
(an idea that seems to have almost violent opposition), and of course
to get us laid.

Funny how it's not doing either of those things worth a damn.

- Adam L. Beberg - ***@mithral.com
http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/

[Elias Sinderson]

Post by Adam L Beberg

Post by Elias
Give me software agents to manage my schedule, make my travel plans
and prioritize my communications. Give me sharp electronic eyes and
let me surf the info skies...

You have it completely backwards. Give me agents and robots and AI so
I don't NEED to schedule, travel for work, talk to telemarketers, read
spam, or watch commercials.

Beberg, let me spell it out a little clearer for you: I also want agents
to handle my schedule so I don't need to, but I would like them to tell
me when I have a virtual teleconference with someone important. I like
to take vacations and travel when I do so. I really don't like planning
the travel aspect of vacations though, especially when it involves many
modes of travel to get to a remote trailhead somewhere. I do however
know my preferences and would be happy to spend the time necessary to
express my travel constraints in a formal way - provided, of couthat my
electronic assistant will hande the messy details and just tell me when
my flight is or when the boat leaves. As for the telemarketrs, spam and
commercials, where the hell do you think they would end up in my
prioritized heap of communiques and info streams?

Post by Adam L Beberg
We're under full assault from the second we wake up to overflowing
inboxes and phones and every other form of sensory (read: stress)
overload.

Try getting out more - nature is cool and decidedly less demanding of
your sensorium.


Elias

[Michael Shields]

Post by Adam L Beberg
The cold hard facts are coming in... except in tightly controlled
situations, email is no longer a net gain in productivity. Neither is
IM. This guy deserves a medal...

Do you have a reference to an actual study of productivity, or even to
improved results from banning email? The article you cited only notes
one company, in one industry that doesn't involve all that much intra-
company communication, that has not even tried this for long enough to
have even anecdotal conclusions. That's not a "cold hard fact".