Craig Burma's Declaration of "Lessening Dependence" on Email

 
 

Background

Since my first email on Prodigy in 1988, email has grown as a percentage of my daily life. Like greenhouse gasses, email grew slowly and invisibly over time in the sources from which email came and the impact has increasingly had on my life.

And like global warming, I believe my misuse of email has had a negative impact on those around me by requiring them to read, file, detach, respond to, archive and search through the mountain of information I have communicated through emails.

Craig Burma's Declaration of "lessening dependence" on Email

I declare email is failing as a tool in the advancement of my career. I admit better, more effective collaboration tools can be used for many of the things I have been trying to accomplish through the misuse of email. Specifically, I will no longer use email to….

 
 

mindlessly distract me from the importance of project work	I will use www.rescuetime.com to monitor the time I spend getting through email. No more than 2 hours per day
manage my daily tasks	I will intentionally prepare a daily plan at the end of each day for the next day. I will intentionally consider whether to alter that plan based on any one email and note if I do.
invite comments, ask for consensus, or edits on a document	I will use meetings and WebEx meetings to collaborate on them and then edit and post results
send "FYI" emails and cite sending people an email on any subject	I will state a clear action for the reader and a suggested timeframe for a response (other than ASAP which is implied)
store historical records of who said what and when	One Note with conversation records; or a notepad
send normally recurring data to a set email group	Instead I will use Sharepoint or other collaboration tools that store files and send notification emails.
volley a task assigned to me to another simply to cross it off my list	I will own the task until another agrees it is not mine to complete.
engage in verbal jousting with people I disagree with	I will call them and take the issue head on including any escalation of an issue for discussion.
write long diatribes or procedures, or policies, or historical recordings of past events.	I will limit all emails to 160 characters or less using Text Tally http://www.harmonyhollow.net/ttally.shtml and copy them into email responses.     For reference, 160 characters looks like this: "I want to see how many characters it takes to type 160 characters. It is about this long and I believe it takes about 2 minutes to type a response and send back."
alleviate my responsibility from taking further action to ensure any deadline is met.	Project deadlines are up to me and my ability to get them done; not my ability to click "send." No one has ever questioned how good I have been at doing that. :-)

I believe I am at the early adopter edge of a positive change in my career that will dramatically improve my ability to communicate and collaborate in ways surpassing any false sense of productivity I believed I gained by blasting out emails.

P.S. WOW did I have a tough time posting this out WITHOUT emailing it to a bunch of people. That's step 1!!!