Email Overload - Is there a real-time solution?

People have changed the way they communicate in numerous ways since the past 50 years, of which e-mail is a significant one. Electronic mail is a natural use of networked communication technology that developed along with the evolution of the Internet. Network capable email was developed for the ARPANET shortly after it's creation, and has now evolved into the powerful email technology that is the most widely used application on the Internet today.

Research has shown that people actively use e-mail to maintain core social networks, particularly when alters live at a distance. Today a lot of Social Networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have changed personal communications from emails to online communities, but still use emails as a mediating factor. For businesses, however, e-mail is extensively used as the widely accepted, first board electronic communication medium. E-mail is very simple to understand and like postal mail, e-mail solves two basic problems of communication:

• Logistics- E-mail provides a way to exchange information between two or more people with no set-up costs that is generally far less expensive than physical meetings or phone calls.
• Synchronization – With real time communication by meetings or phone calls, participants have to work on the same schedule; with e-mail each participant may control their schedule independently.

Most business workers today spend two or more hours of their working day on e-mail: reading, ordering, sorting, 're-contextualizing' fragmented information, and writing e-mail. The use of e-mail is increasing due to increasing levels of globalization—labor division and outsourcing amongst other things. E-mail can lead to some well-known problems:

• Loss of Context: which means that the context is lost forever; there is no way to get the text back. Information in context (as in a newspaper) is much easier and faster to understand than unedited and sometimes unrelated fragments of information. Communicating in context can only be achieved when both parties have a full understanding of the context and issue in question.
• Information overload: E-mail is a push technology —the sender controls who receives the information. Convenient availability of mailing lists and use of "copy all" can lead to people receiving unwanted or irrelevant information of no use to them.
• Inconsistency: E-mail can duplicate information. This can be a problem when a large team is working on documents and information while not in constant contact with the other members of their team.
• Overloaded Inbox: If we don't vigilantly organize our inbox we generally fall into the problem of full inbox and it becomes difficult to send further emails. We have to go back to the inbox and delete mails everytime this problem occurs, which happens quite frequently esp. with Outlook
• Buried emails: Due to icreasing Inboxes most of the times important emails that we intend to take action on or follow up seem to get buried deep down somewhere and we have to scratch our heads to search for that email

Despite these disadvantages, e-mail has become the most widely used medium of communication within the business world. A December 2007 New York Times blog post described E-mail as "a $650 Billion Drag on the Economy", and the New York Times reported in April 2008 that "E-MAIL has become the bane of some people's professional lives due to information overload."

Is there a real way to deal with this? There are several articles on the web that educate us about goood email management practices. However, do our senders also follow those rules. Not necessarily.

The key to solve this problem is to get organized and there are some really good ways to do that. Some email providers are providing features like "Prioritization of Emails" as a real-time solution. Yahoo has an application for automatic prioritization. There is also an Outlook plugin for Outlook 2003/2007 for automatic prioritization called Nubli.These softwares automatically prioritize your emails into high, medium and low so as to help you focus your attention on each segment as per your time availability.

Some software providers like Nubli go a notch higher and provide you with features like automated tagging which goes a long way into automatically organizing your inbox without you making a consciouss effort to do so. Nubli also has a dashboard to give you an overview of whats happening to your inbox so that you can easily combat the problem of buried emails mentioned above.

On the other hand Google is coming up with Google wave to deal with this problem which they say is a combination of Gtalk, Google Docs, Gmail and some other Google apps to do away totally with emails.

The above solutions are the latest developments in combating email overload. Start using these solutions as your inbox is only going to increase with time. Get a grip of your inbox now before it grips you!!