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Managing Your E-Mail

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Managing Your E-Mail

Thinking Outside the Inbox

Wiley,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

Control your flood of e-mail by prioritizing what you read and send. And if you think e-mail is private, think again.

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

This excellent short guide to the promise and peril of e-mail reveals some surprising and little-noted facts. Far from creating a paperless office, for example, e-mail has multiplied the paper businesses consume. Along with making communication more convenient, immediate and spontaneous, e-mail has raised false expectations and increased the probability of hard feelings and misunderstandings. If those were the only problems this book spotlights, it would be worthwhile to take it seriously. But author Christina A. Cavanagh additionally offers some frightening examples about the invisible cost of e-mail, measured in terms of employee time and legal risk. The book has a tendency to repetitiveness and prolixity, and many of the recommendations for managing e-mail are familiar. However, getAbstract.com particularly recommends her strong examples, which may convince managers to implement the best practices they may already understand but often ignore.

Summary

E-mail: Good News and Bad News

People who think e-mail is safe, convenient and inexpensive just haven’t paid attention to its risks, inefficiency and cost.

It’s not unusual for a North American office worker to receive 50 or more e-mails every day. Almost half of these messages are irrelevant or of very low relevance and certainly not worth the time it takes to read, delete or respond to them. Data storage and time aren’t cheap, yet most companies store all or most of their e-mails on electronic media, and printed copies of e-mails choke file drawers. These stored e-mails are a gold mine for plaintiffs’ attorneys looking for evidence when suing a firm for unfair employment practices, product liability or other alleged misdeeds.

Not only is e-mail expensive and potentially risky, it is often inferior to other ways of communicating, such as the telephone or even face-to-face conversations. Yet people seem inexplicably reluctant to use those other methods when e-mail is available.

E-mail has both hidden costs and invisible risks, but if you use it and manage it strategically, you can get the most out of the medium without being overwhelmed.

The Promise...

About the Author

Christina A. Cavanagh is professor of management communications at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. She is also a consultant on the use of e-mail.

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