by Michelle Lentz

This week, NPR has been running a series on Morning Edition on The Email Age. Two of the pieces, in particular, caught my fancy.

You see, I lived in Outlook. My whole world is loaded into the contacts, email, tasks and calendar. It’s sad really. This week I switched to a Mac and decided to leave the comforts of Microsoft and use Mail.app. It was a fight, but I won by customizing Mail pretty in-depth.  Why was it so important? Because I get hundreds of emails a day from multiple email accounts. It’s ridiculous at times. And I’m not the only one. According to a Radicati Group white paper, the number of email users world wide is approaching two billion. In 2006, the average corporate email user received 126 email messages per day – up 55% from 2003! The Radicati Group estimates that if email traffic continues this trend, the average user will spend 41% of their time managing email by 2009.  That is, in my opinion, a lot of wasted time.

So how do we cope with this? The NPR series brought up two interesting theories: Email Free Days, and Seriosity Attent.

Email Free Fridays have been implemented in several large organizations (US Cellular was spotlighted in the article). Imagine a day at work that is free from internal email. If you want to discuss an idea, set up a meeting, or get an answer, you need to either pick up the phone or go find your co-worker. I rather like this idea. But it doesn’t eliminate email entirely for the day. For instance, if my husband’s advertising agency implemented this, it wouldn’t help him too much – he’d still be deluged by  emails from his clients. Just because company A has email free Fridays doesn’t mean it applies to companies B-Z. But it’s a nice thought and would serve, I would think, to foster communication internally and at least slightly cut down on email for a day.

Attent is a new email productivity tool by Seriosity.  This is a really interesting tool. Attent turns email into its own economy using Serios (think dollars). Each week you are given a set number of Serios. For this example, we’ll use 300. For each email you send, you must attach at least 1 Serio. If it’s a really important email, you might attach 50 Serios; for a less important email, you might attach 5 Serios. In this way, you are taking the time to consider each email you compose and deciding if it’s worth the email or might be just as easily expressed in a phone call or Face to Face communication. Similarly, the person receiving the email can instantly judge whether it is important and should be acted on right away (50 Serios) or if it is something that can wait until later (5 Serios). Like Email Free Fridays, this only will work internally or with other folks who are using Attent.

Attent hosts all of the Serio Accounting information (your Serio Bank Account) on their servers, and all that is required is a plug-in for the email king of them all – Outlook. It’s an interesting experiment. I like that it forces you to consider – is this really worth an email? Watch a Flash demo of Seriosity Attent.

In order to manage my chaotic email, I’ve installed MailTags, MsgFiler, YAI, and more. It doesn’t control the sheer number of incoming messages, but at least it helps me organize them and stay semi-productive. How do you control and organize your emails? Would your company be perfect for something like Email Free days or Seriosity Attent?

__
Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, or via Pownce.

Tagged as: email, email free friday, NPR, productivity, seriosity