This becomes worrying when we realise the two entities are ourselves and email, with the resource they are competing for being our time.

In evolutionary terms, email has fantastic survival characteristics: it’s very easy for people to help messages reproduce by replying, copying and forwarding emails. It’s simple to develop and use distribution lists encouraging still more reproduction of the same message. Those recipients are tempted to reply, forward, copy… and so on.

Now with the advent of mobile email, not only can we send more messages from more places at more times, but the same messages can pop up in different places. (Do you receive the same email on your hand-held and your PC?)

Combine all this with the addictive nature of email: we hear the “ping” of a new message and we have the expectation that here is something that will be interesting – and it does not seem to matter how many times we are disappointed. What is it like for you to hear the “ping” or see the little envelope on the task bar and then not look?

It’s no wonder email is becoming so prevalent.

Let quantify the problem. Surveys I have conducted with 6,000 people from 100 organisations show that:

• Email users received on average 34 emails per day – and about half of them are useless (I mean 47% of the emails they receive are useless: I make no comment on how well those people do their jobs).

• These users are sending on average 25 emails every day.

• Only about a third of all emails are originated by the sender. Mostly people are just commenting on or adding to someone else’s message.

• 72% of email users spend at least one hour every day on email.

• For the vast majority of these people email is not their job: it’s a means to an end. Their job is to buy, sell, fix, create or maybe destroy something. Email is supposed to be helping them do their job, rather than becoming a chore that gets in the way of them achieving their work goals.

• 10% demonstrate a real addiction to the medium.

• People are hoarding on average 2769 emails each “just in case.” The vast majority of these messages will never be looked at again.

And these figures are constantly changing: traffic grows by about 20% each year, so bad as the problems are now, they are only going to get worse.

If we are not going to be swept away by the avalanche we need to fight back.

What can we do?

We cause our own problems
Firstly we need to recognise that we ourselves are causing the problem. Whatever we are doing (or not doing) is perpetuating the status quo. If we want things to be different we have to behave differently ourselves – so the question becomes: “What can I do to start eliciting fewer emails?”

Here are some suggestions:

• Send out fewer copies and you will receive fewer replies.

• If you’re still being copied into old projects, talk to the list manager and ask to be removed from the list.

• Tell people what you do and don’t want to receive. At your next team meeting tell your boss what you do and do not find useful about the emails s/he sends. Also tell the people whom you manage the kind of information you do not want to receive.

Use other media (eg wiki or phone or legs)

Email (or text or Instant Messaging) are not the best media for conversations. The best way to have a conversation is to have a conversation. Go and see someone or phone them up.

Four people trying to arrange something by email will soon lead to a plethora of unsynchronised messages as people reply-all again and again. Why not use a wiki like a shared electronic flip chart that a group can jointly view and edit? Here’s a link to a four-minute video that explains a bit more about wikis and points you to some publicly-available ones: http://expert-messaging.com/freeinfo.php (and choose “Wikis in plain english).

Just do it

We also need to be smart with how we manage the messages that come through and can borrow a simple technique from paper-based time management.

Aim to handle each email just once and apply the 4 D’s: Do, Defer, Delegate, Delete.

If you can deal with it in 3 minutes, Do it.

If it will take longer, Defer it. This is not just “putting it off”, you need to schedule some time to action it.

If the email can better be dealt with by someone else, Delegate it (and make sure you have already had a conversation with them so the delegated email does not arrive as a complete surprise).

And if it’s completely irrelevant, Delete it. And if you recognise it’s going to be rubbish before you open the email, delete it straight away without opening.

Finally, if you want to make a commitment to changing how you use email, you can sign up to Expert Messaging’s email Charter. Applying the simple principles contained in the Charter will save the typical user about an hour every day. http://www.expert-messaging.com/email-charter.php

We started with the idea that we are in competition with email over the limited time we have available. The big advantage we have over email is our intelligence and unless we start applying it, we will lose the competition.

It’s time to start fighting back.