E-mail: the deluge continues
How can we channel the Niagara of messages?
David Winch, UNOG
Remember when e-mail was fun? Today, it is more like a
deluge. SMS messages took over in the fun department,
and e-mail is becoming a drag. For many staff working
at computers, opening the e-mail is like opening a
stuffed file cabinet each day.
Hundreds of messages can accumulate during a two-week
vacation and even thousands during a longer absence on mission.
This leaves staff the added task of deleting and pruning, which
invariably leaves lots of unread mail and heavy archives. “A few years ago, businesses were asking us to help their
employees use more e-mail messages”, notes French consultant
Bruno Savoyat in Le Monde. “Today, it’s the opposite; we are intervening
to prevent people from being drowned in all the messages.”
Free to send
E-mail is basically free for the sender and the low entry costs
encourage ever-expanding quantities. Spam multiplies this
volume. UNOG has taken some aggressive steps to weed out
the pesky and relentless spam, or what the French now call
pourriel. Lately this has featured thousands of German-language
Viagra promotions, for example, that bombard UN
computers. But the problem remains, and more often UN
staff themselves are the source of it.
In 2002, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the late Sergio
Vieira de Mello, sent a memo detailing his frustration with
excessive e-mail: “I am flabbergasted by the volume of e-mail
within our office,” he wrote to staff. “I find it simply overwhelming… and at times I question how productive it makes us.”
Vieira de Mello proposed tailoring e-mail to one’s specific
audience, rather than sending it to everybody. More noteworthy
was his proposal of making one day a week – he proposed
Wednesdays – an internal no-email day: “I suspect our work
will be just as … productive if we acclimatize to this
discipline,” he concluded.
Status inversion?
Social innovations and inventions are sometimes a treat when
they are a novelty, but then become banal and a chore. (The first
washing machines must have been exciting to use!) Or, like
smoking, they start out with a strong whiff of class (in that case,
upper class insouciance), then steadily migrate downwards on the
social scale over the years and become disreputable.
Will higher-ups start avoiding their inboxes? This is suggested
by the (perhaps apocryphal) anecdote that “Condoleezza Rice
reads no e-mail”. Why should she, when she can always summon
the authors for a personal briefing?
There are advantages to e-mail, of course, or we would not be
having this problem. But the common-sense solutions – separating
personal from professional mail boxes, only cc’ing the most
concerned parties – can be tried without affecting the overall
problem.
Maybe someone at the UN should strike a working group and
launch a pilot project. No doubt there will be an e-mail on that
subject in your inbox tomorrow.
© 2006 UN Special |