Attack of the Email message

Remember the days when communication was solely based on picking up the phone or knocking on an office door asking for a minute. Those days have been replaced by email in your inbox, tweets and instant messages. Tweets and instant messages are for the most part short and sweet. Email in your inbox, well that’s just another story all together. Can you count how many times have you been overwhelmed by enormous amounts of unread email messages.

Perhaps we should all rethink hitting that send button and maybe pick up that phone or walk to that office door and knock. Chris Anderson from the Washington Post states "In the blink of an eye, my day’s priorities have been commandeered" and "the unintended consequence is that communication volume is expanding to the point where it threatens to take over our lives."

To help battle email overload, Chris and his colleague Jane Wulf drafted an Email Charter to try to get people to adapt to new rules when sending email. Their 10 points all encourage email senders to go easier on the responders. Share this with your colleagues and friends, after all rule #10 states “If we all agreed to spend less time doing email, we'd all get less email!”