Bye Bye Email

Just think of it-- opening up your Monday morning emails after a long weekend to find out that.. you can't. Instead your office has imposed a NO EMAIL week. I don't know if I would be thrilled or horrified to be quite honest. Sounds radical but recently the chief executive (Shayne Hughes) of the organization, Learning as Leadership imposed this idea. He didn't go so far as to ban email in entirety rather all internal emails. Not surprisingly he received many complaints that I myself would have been thinking as well, for example: 

  - "We won't get anything done"
 - "We'll be interrupting each other every two minutes"
 - " I can't wait a week to have a one-to-one"

So why would he propose such a concept - well, he states that "internal email is half to three quarters of all traffic. Reading, processing, managing, organizing, and responding to it absorbs vast amounts of time." After thinking about it, at least in my case, is entirely true. 

He goes so far to proclaim that e-mail isn't a communication tool, and that often we just use it as a medium to send out a flurry of thoughts and concerns without a second thought. 

It does seem like as soon as you begin to clear out your email, you come to find that your inbox is quickly filling up with more things to do and problems to solve. Am I the only one who has to block off hours during the week just to read and answer emails? 

At first, I thought Shayne's idea was too extreme but afterwards it did make me realize how much time we are forced to spend on email. I have mixed emotions but sadly, I don't see it being a possibility in reducing time spent both internally and externally communicating via email. 

Would anyone else be bothered by not being able to internally communicate with your colleagues for a week, or would you welcome that? 

Intrigued to learn more about Shayne's experiment, visit the Forbes article here.