Complaints about email abound. Perhaps you've heard some of these or uttered them in pain yourself: I receive hundreds of emails a day. I can spend my whole day responding to incoming messages. I can't find anything in my inbox. In response, some companies are taking drastic steps to help workers manage the number of messages they receive. The CEO of Atos, a French IT services company, has vowed to ban internal email by 2013. Volkswagen in Germany has agreed to stop sending emails to certain employees after work hours. If these companies are taking radical action, is it time for you to do the same to counter your own overload?
What the Experts Say
Productivity experts counsel against such extreme measures. Email is certainly a threat to efficiency, says David Allen, a consultant and the author of Getting Things Done and Making It All Work, but he maintains that it's also an essential work tool. "I've had email since 1983. I couldn't live the life I live without it," he says. Bob Pozen, a senior lecturer of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of "Extreme Productivity" agrees. Even if you wanted to use it less, he says, it's nearly impossible to get people by phone or in person these days. Both Pozen and Allen believe that sweeping rules like the ones Atos and VW are trying are not necessary. You can regain control over your email, and reduce its insidious effects on your productivity, by looking at the root causes of the problem and then following a few straightforward rules.
Productivity experts counsel against such extreme measures. Email is certainly a threat to efficiency, says David Allen, a consultant and the author of Getting Things Done and Making It All Work, but he maintains that it's also an essential work tool. "I've had email since 1983. I couldn't live the life I live without it," he says. Bob Pozen, a senior lecturer of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of "Extreme Productivity" agrees. Even if you wanted to use it less, he says, it's nearly impossible to get people by phone or in person these days. Both Pozen and Allen believe that sweeping rules like the ones Atos and VW are trying are not necessary. You can regain control over your email, and reduce its insidious effects on your productivity, by looking at the root causes of the problem and then following a few straightforward rules.
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