Shutting Off E-mail? Think again!

I came to Overload book site after reading Jonathan Spira's comments on Atos's plan to turn off its e-mail system and I wanted to add my thoughts on e-mail today.

Over the course of one week, I measured the percentage of e-mails that were actually relevant for me to see.  Out of 725 e-mails, only 15% actually mattered.  This means that hundreds were unnecessarily sent to me and others.

The other thing I measured that week was the number of cc's on the unnecessary e-mails.  The average there was eight but it ranged all over the place from no cc's to hundreds.

Clearly, if you take what the Overload book says seriously (and I do), the costs in a company of 20,000 (such as mine) are huge.

Think of all the time we'd save if we actually just sent e-mails to the people who needed to see them.