From: Hugh Lilly <hl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Dave,
David Pogue has an interesting column this week.
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Subject: Circuits: Better Off Without E-Mail?
Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 05:45
From: "The New York Times Direct" <NYTDirect@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: h.lilly@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Better Off Without E-Mail?
You already know that individuals and businesses worldwide are struggling to
fix e-mail. The spam, the viruses, the irrelevant forwarding, the insipid
joke mailing lists . . . whatever productivity gains e-mail once offered are
rapidly being offset by the time we spend weeding through the chaff.
So far, though, nobody has gone as far as suggesting that we're better off
without e-mail entirely. Until now. John Caudwell is the millionaire head of
Phones 4U, a chain of high-end cellphone stores in the U.K. Last week, in a
move that's causing shockwaves among, well, just about everybody, he banned
all internal e-mail among his 2,500 employees. (They're still allowed to
correspond with customers, suppliers, their repair division and so on.) Mr.
Caudwell says he wants his company to conduct their transactions by phone or
face to face.
"Management and staff at HQ and in the stores were beginning to show signs of
being constrained by e-mail proliferation," Mr. Caudwell told reporters. "The
ban brought an instant, dramatic and positive effect."
How instant and how dramatic? He says that he'll save three hours per day per
employee, and over $1.6 million per month. That's a huge productivity boost
by any company's standards.
Still, my first reaction was that Mr. Caudwell is, well, not the sharpest
knife in the drawer. E-mail does sap away time, but it also saves massive
amounts of time. You can conduct an e-mail transaction in a fraction of the
time you'd need for a phone call - meanwhile, you get a permanent record of
the exchange, one that you can search, sort and share with people who weren't
present.
But then I began to wonder. Have we reached the tipping point, where the time
we save and the time we waste are canceling each other out?
I couldn't help but fantasize about what I'd do with two free hours a day
(that's about how much time I spend on e-mail, and I'm still thousands of
responses behind). I could spend more time with my kids, do a better job of
staying fit, get more sleep ...I could be a better man! I could lead a
better, longer life!
But that's only the beginning. E-mail is a real productivity sapper, sure,
but
what about the telephone? Talk about time-wasters! It takes you ten times as
long to say the same thing, plus you're spending it with only one person.
What an incredible time drain!
Ban phone calls too, I say. Mr. Caudwell would save another three hours a day
per employee.
And don't forget about computers. Good heavens, in the time we spend learning
them, debugging them, backing them up, maintaining them, installing new
patches and drivers, we're losing billions of person-hours a year. Get rid of
them, too! There's another three hours a day saved.
And while we're at it, get rid of the TV's. Let's take back the billions and
billions of hours we lose to television. And cars - who wouldn't rather
reclaim the time we spend hunting for parking and sitting in traffic?
And fax machines, and PalmPilots, and the Internet! Just kidding.
Listen, if you really want to save time and productivity, ban meetings. Now
you're onto something.
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Visit David Pogue on the Web at DavidPogue.com.
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