For the last six working days I have been unable to use my IBM Lotus Notes client. It turns out that a duplicated record on an LDAP server was responsible for the mess. Finally, after spending hours over the phone pleading for help, IBM’s internal help desk was finally able to diagnose and solve the problem. However, as expected, after such a long period of time without accessing my e-mail, my account was jammed with unread mail.
It took me ten hours of non-stop work to go through my unread e-mail and delete enough worthless mails in order to just be able to re-activate my account (at IBM we cannot send messages unless our inbox size drops under a 200GB limit). That made me think. If after so much work all I could claim was to have cleaned my inbox (which offers absolutely no business value) I am not sure that better communications are helping my productivity. In fact, it seems that I spend almost two hours a day working on useless mail.
Ever since I was a small child my parents taught me to analyze at the end of the day if it had been productive. Always ask yourself, what did you do today? That was a message my mother kept telling me. I guess that after much repetition, it finally stuck with me and I now feel either guilty or disappointed if I was unable to do something productive or meaningful during a particular day.
However, mail is not the only problem. Browsing the Internet is also an activity that quickly reduces personal productivity. Despite all the virtues of this technology, I know that I am far more productive when I am disconnected, with no distractions. However, since this happens less and less, in the end, it is just a matter of personal discipline. Everyone must learn how to set daily or weekly personal objectives for themselves in order to evaluate their productivity and correct automatically any deviations before receiving complaints from their boss, teacher, spouse or kids.
I am somewhat worried that schools do not spend time teaching children a skill that is so important. Learning it is critical to a successful life. However, while it is nice to know that you should not waste your time, it is also clear that the information overload that we are facing forces us to work longer hours just to obtain the same results.
There have been many proposals to fight spam. One such proposal included charging a low, nominal fee for e-mail (say US$0.01 for example). This was an interesting idea, since it would made the business of spam much less profitable. While the idea was interesting, it was impossible to implement, on a global scale. However, such an idea could easily be implemented inside the enterprise. If every employee knew that adding someone to the cc list did have an associated cost, we could finally start reducing the ridiculous amount of mail that is currently killing the knowledge worker.