Five ways to ditch email
12 October 2012
Read by 2375 persons
This revolutionary tool has ultimately shown its limits. Could we free ourselves from it? The idea is gaining ground. Here's how to minimize the impact of emails on your daily life.
In the 1990s, at the dawn of the internet for everyone, we discovered that, thanks to email, we could start a discussion with different people, send electronic documents to multiple correspondents at once. In private and professional life, this revolutionized communication. Twenty years later, the assessment is more mixed: your inbox is overwhelmed with useless messages and you spend a lot of time sorting, deleting, or responding to them.
More than 247 billion emails are sent every day worldwide. In 2013, this figure will climb to 500 billion... most of which are spam, according to antivirus publisher Symantec. If messaging filters have stemmed this flood of "unwanted" emails (2% today compared to 30% in 2006), everything is not settled, because only a small part of the emails received is really relevant.
Is it possible to dispense with all-email? The idea is appealing when you compare the time spent managing this tool with its real usefulness. To learn to free yourself from it, adopt these good practices.
Start by stopping replying to everyone
Half of internet users spend more than two hours a day managing their email inbox, 38% receive more than 100 messages daily, and 65% check their account every five minutes, according to a study by the Corporate Social Responsibility Observatory. "Email puts a somewhat absurd pressure on us: it encourages us to respond very quickly without thinking too much," says Jean-Louis Mutte, director of Sup de co Amiens. A vicious cycle, according to journalist MG Siegler, contributor to TechCrunch (Silicon Valley's leading blog): "When you receive an email, you feel you should respond, if only out of politeness. This quickly creates a mass effect." The solution? Stop being polite! You will waste less time and dissuade your interlocutors from bombarding you. For a month, the TechCrunch blogger forced himself to only respond to messages concerning his current articles. Result: 15,000 messages received and 43 sent. "Yet, I didn't feel like I missed anything important," he smiles.
Adopt basic rules and strictly respect them
Even if they seem crucial at the time you receive them, most emails are not essential. Take the test, only look at them three times a day. You probably won't have missed anything important (in case of emergency, you will be called).
To prevent emails from weighing down our days, communication consultant Gunnar Michielssen recommends following five basic rules. One, unsubscribe from newsletters. Two, get rid of windows announcing the arrival of a message, because even if one resists the urge to interrupt one's work to read it, one will have been distracted. Three, never start your day by checking your inbox. Four, only copy people who are really involved. Five, regularly empty your inbox - and if you have to perform an urgent task after receiving an email, execute it first, then delete the message or file it in the appropriate folder.
Try "no mail Friday" and walking!
Why not adopt "no mail Friday", in other words one day a week (Friday, for example) without emails? Does the idea seem daring? Nothing prevents you from starting by testing it more sporadically. Since 2007, several American companies (US Cellular, Deloitte, Intel...) have asked their employees to stop sending emails on certain Fridays or weekends. In France, Canon organizes a day without emails every quarter. "On that day, we encourage employees to think about other solutions," explains the HR director, Philippe Le Disert. Result: 20% fewer messages the first time and 50% the second.
Use this day to deal with files that don't require electronic exchanges. If you need an attachment, go get it without looking at other messages. A trick to avoid giving in to temptation: sort them by sender and not by date of receipt. The hardest part will be not using the "Send" function. If the person to contact is in a nearby office, walk! "At Canon," notes Philippe Le Disert, "some employees only communicated by email, even from two offices away. With "no mail Fridays", they got back into the habit of moving around." Canon plans to extend the measure to the 10 pm-6 am slot. In Germany, Volkswagen cuts the flow between 6:15 pm and 7 am (emails are then no longer directed to smartphones, except for senior executives). Much more ambitious, the CEO of Atos, Thierry Breton, has promised to make his company the first "zero email" company by 2014.
Take advantage of the company's collaborative tools
Thierry Breton's solution to avoid emails? To focus on collaborative tools and community platforms, used by 40% of companies with more than 50 employees (according to a Cegos study conducted with 300 companies). The 2010 version of SharePoint thus integrates multiple functionalities: instant messaging (called Link), video conferencing that can bring together up to seventeen people simultaneously, the ability to work together on online Office files without needing to have the software. As for SMEs without an IT department, they can use Office 365 or Google Apps and leverage the power of "cloud computing" to adopt new working methods. "Gone are the days when everyone worked on their own computer," summarizes Hélène Tellitocci, head of office solutions at Cegos. "Files are shared on a central server. Everyone can make changes, leave comments, receive messages or be notified of changes, with the certainty of consulting the latest version."
As soon as you need to work with more than two people on a project, a file, or a contract, adopt this collaboration mode. The advantage? You no longer send each other emails to talk about the document or ask for modifications. And this simplifies meetings since the remarks, usually exchanged verbally, are incorporated into the document.
Orange, Alcatel-Lucent, Danone, Dassault Systèmes, Air Liquide, Renault... a quarter of French companies have developed their own social network, a kind of internal Facebook. "Discussions are then organized within public or private groups," observes Stéphane Lapeyrade, animator of the Engage network at Alcatel-Lucent. "We share meeting minutes, information on a technology." With, in the end, an automatic reduction in the number of emails. Looking for a specialist? Rather than sending twenty emails blindly, you just need to post a public request. "This requires a change in mentality," warns Stéphane Lapeyrade, "because this type of approach is not in the culture of companies. Yet it is devilishly effective!"
With the outside of the company, use social networks
Doing without email to communicate externally seems much more difficult. "But that's changing," says Philippe Gérard, digital communication manager at Cegos. "More and more contacts, even professional ones, are going through social networks." However, you still need to be able to juggle the different platforms depending on the nature of the messages and their recipients (not everyone is registered everywhere). Facebook will thus be reserved for non-urgent messages, but you will not hesitate to use it for conversations with several people, because the site allows you to integrate or remove an interlocutor as exchanges progress. LinkedIn and Viadeo also offer more and more messaging features (thanks to OpenLink, you can contact anyone on the network). The advantage: your message will be more visible than an email because these two networks are less saturated. Finally, don't forget Twitter, precious for contacting people you don't know.
Looking for a more reactive tool? Opt for instant messaging (BlackBerry Messenger, WhatsApp, MSN), where each received message appears as an alert. Skype is also an interesting option, with its multiple formats (audio, video, chat) and the possibility of leaving written messages to your offline contacts. Finally, there are collaborative tools adapted to external communication. Dropbox or YouSendIt allow you to store and share files that are too large to be sent by email. With Google Docs, you can also create shared online documents. All these tools should free you from the weight of email.
Philippe Istria.
Capital.fr
Posted online October 12, 2012.
In the 1990s, at the dawn of the internet for everyone, we discovered that, thanks to email, we could start a discussion with different people, send electronic documents to multiple correspondents at once. In private and professional life, this revolutionized communication. Twenty years later, the assessment is more mixed: your inbox is overwhelmed with useless messages and you spend a lot of time sorting, deleting, or responding to them.
More than 247 billion emails are sent every day worldwide. In 2013, this figure will climb to 500 billion... most of which are spam, according to antivirus publisher Symantec. If messaging filters have stemmed this flood of "unwanted" emails (2% today compared to 30% in 2006), everything is not settled, because only a small part of the emails received is really relevant.
Is it possible to dispense with all-email? The idea is appealing when you compare the time spent managing this tool with its real usefulness. To learn to free yourself from it, adopt these good practices.
Start by stopping replying to everyone
Half of internet users spend more than two hours a day managing their email inbox, 38% receive more than 100 messages daily, and 65% check their account every five minutes, according to a study by the Corporate Social Responsibility Observatory. "Email puts a somewhat absurd pressure on us: it encourages us to respond very quickly without thinking too much," says Jean-Louis Mutte, director of Sup de co Amiens. A vicious cycle, according to journalist MG Siegler, contributor to TechCrunch (Silicon Valley's leading blog): "When you receive an email, you feel you should respond, if only out of politeness. This quickly creates a mass effect." The solution? Stop being polite! You will waste less time and dissuade your interlocutors from bombarding you. For a month, the TechCrunch blogger forced himself to only respond to messages concerning his current articles. Result: 15,000 messages received and 43 sent. "Yet, I didn't feel like I missed anything important," he smiles.
Adopt basic rules and strictly respect them
Even if they seem crucial at the time you receive them, most emails are not essential. Take the test, only look at them three times a day. You probably won't have missed anything important (in case of emergency, you will be called).
To prevent emails from weighing down our days, communication consultant Gunnar Michielssen recommends following five basic rules. One, unsubscribe from newsletters. Two, get rid of windows announcing the arrival of a message, because even if one resists the urge to interrupt one's work to read it, one will have been distracted. Three, never start your day by checking your inbox. Four, only copy people who are really involved. Five, regularly empty your inbox - and if you have to perform an urgent task after receiving an email, execute it first, then delete the message or file it in the appropriate folder.
Try "no mail Friday" and walking!
Why not adopt "no mail Friday", in other words one day a week (Friday, for example) without emails? Does the idea seem daring? Nothing prevents you from starting by testing it more sporadically. Since 2007, several American companies (US Cellular, Deloitte, Intel...) have asked their employees to stop sending emails on certain Fridays or weekends. In France, Canon organizes a day without emails every quarter. "On that day, we encourage employees to think about other solutions," explains the HR director, Philippe Le Disert. Result: 20% fewer messages the first time and 50% the second.
Use this day to deal with files that don't require electronic exchanges. If you need an attachment, go get it without looking at other messages. A trick to avoid giving in to temptation: sort them by sender and not by date of receipt. The hardest part will be not using the "Send" function. If the person to contact is in a nearby office, walk! "At Canon," notes Philippe Le Disert, "some employees only communicated by email, even from two offices away. With "no mail Fridays", they got back into the habit of moving around." Canon plans to extend the measure to the 10 pm-6 am slot. In Germany, Volkswagen cuts the flow between 6:15 pm and 7 am (emails are then no longer directed to smartphones, except for senior executives). Much more ambitious, the CEO of Atos, Thierry Breton, has promised to make his company the first "zero email" company by 2014.
Take advantage of the company's collaborative tools
Thierry Breton's solution to avoid emails? To focus on collaborative tools and community platforms, used by 40% of companies with more than 50 employees (according to a Cegos study conducted with 300 companies). The 2010 version of SharePoint thus integrates multiple functionalities: instant messaging (called Link), video conferencing that can bring together up to seventeen people simultaneously, the ability to work together on online Office files without needing to have the software. As for SMEs without an IT department, they can use Office 365 or Google Apps and leverage the power of "cloud computing" to adopt new working methods. "Gone are the days when everyone worked on their own computer," summarizes Hélène Tellitocci, head of office solutions at Cegos. "Files are shared on a central server. Everyone can make changes, leave comments, receive messages or be notified of changes, with the certainty of consulting the latest version."
As soon as you need to work with more than two people on a project, a file, or a contract, adopt this collaboration mode. The advantage? You no longer send each other emails to talk about the document or ask for modifications. And this simplifies meetings since the remarks, usually exchanged verbally, are incorporated into the document.
Orange, Alcatel-Lucent, Danone, Dassault Systèmes, Air Liquide, Renault... a quarter of French companies have developed their own social network, a kind of internal Facebook. "Discussions are then organized within public or private groups," observes Stéphane Lapeyrade, animator of the Engage network at Alcatel-Lucent. "We share meeting minutes, information on a technology." With, in the end, an automatic reduction in the number of emails. Looking for a specialist? Rather than sending twenty emails blindly, you just need to post a public request. "This requires a change in mentality," warns Stéphane Lapeyrade, "because this type of approach is not in the culture of companies. Yet it is devilishly effective!"
With the outside of the company, use social networks
Doing without email to communicate externally seems much more difficult. "But that's changing," says Philippe Gérard, digital communication manager at Cegos. "More and more contacts, even professional ones, are going through social networks." However, you still need to be able to juggle the different platforms depending on the nature of the messages and their recipients (not everyone is registered everywhere). Facebook will thus be reserved for non-urgent messages, but you will not hesitate to use it for conversations with several people, because the site allows you to integrate or remove an interlocutor as exchanges progress. LinkedIn and Viadeo also offer more and more messaging features (thanks to OpenLink, you can contact anyone on the network). The advantage: your message will be more visible than an email because these two networks are less saturated. Finally, don't forget Twitter, precious for contacting people you don't know.
Looking for a more reactive tool? Opt for instant messaging (BlackBerry Messenger, WhatsApp, MSN), where each received message appears as an alert. Skype is also an interesting option, with its multiple formats (audio, video, chat) and the possibility of leaving written messages to your offline contacts. Finally, there are collaborative tools adapted to external communication. Dropbox or YouSendIt allow you to store and share files that are too large to be sent by email. With Google Docs, you can also create shared online documents. All these tools should free you from the weight of email.
Philippe Istria.
Capital.fr
Posted online October 12, 2012.
