Seminal Article - The Tyranny of Email

I'm in the hunt for an online article which blows the whistle on the evil of email, and its use in the workplace. The 20+ folks who work for me have literally become slaves to their email accounts. I acknowledge that email does have value as one method of communication, but it shouldn't become an end unto itself - it should obviously be a means to an end.

Many of my employees have completely forgotten how to talk to customers on the phone, or in person, or even how to communicate with their co-workers, except by email. I know that it's had a huge impact on our productivity. And I can't believe that somehow we've got an exclusive franchise on this problem either.

I've got a high school intern in our group working on a program that will canvass the number of emails we send and receive as an office over a specified period of time. I suspect that in a week's time that "count" will potentially be in the low five figures. Then I want to do some research on the amount of processing time all those messages require, and see if we can recover some productivity, just by highlighting that messages number and suggesting a target that we should all try to reduce our sent and/or received messages by.

I was intrigued to read a couple of years ago about a CEO who recognized this same "email death spiral" and had even stipulated one day a week where no email could be used in the company. I had to laugh when I read that it required some folks to contact co-workers in person or by phone, only to find out that they were just across the hall or in the next cube over from them. I'm not ready to go to that extreme just yet, although I know it would cause a tremendous wave of consternation bordering on a medically diagnosed panic attack for some of my folks.

I don't want to set myself out as some sort of email heretic and position myself to be burned at a virtual stake in the digitial public square, but the madness has to stop. Anyone have a suggestion on an actual article or an online search source for this type of periodical article search (and no, Google is probably not right for this type of literary search effort).

Any help out there, or any other fellow heretics in the audience?

 

Actually, everything I've read about the 20 and younger crowd points to the demise of e-mail as a viable and widely used source of communication. According to the articles I've read, today's young people use texting and instant messaging rather than e-mail. E-mail is more the darling of the older crowd and I suspect it will increasingly lose popularity as these other forms become even more widely used.