Greater Productivity Innovation: E-Mail or Instant Messaging?
March 24, 2005Consider what has increased productivity more, email or instant messaging. While email has done away w/ paper memos and snail mail, I would argue that it has decreased productivity because it is so effective. Now we get information overload with the shear ease of getting added to the CC line. The greatest abuse of a company’s time is employees trying to wade through their inbox. Over the past five-years we have progressed to this information overload. Remember the days when getting an email was so infrequent that it was possible to still get a “You got mail.” sound byte or a pop-up. I know I did away w/ those mail indicators years ago.
Now consider the benefits of getting instant information via the telephone call. It was targeted at one individual who could actually help, and there was not the delay of an employee getting to an email in the inbox ocean. Instant messaging improved on the idea of the telephone by increasing the number of conversations that could happen simultaneously, while also saving time on looking up a number and dialing. I know that instant messaging has reduced the number of telephone calls I receive to virtually zero, and allowed me to get targeted questions w/o bothering other people on the CC list. While instant messaging still has drawback of chatty friends, in a pure business environment, it is the greatest productivity innovation in the past 30 years.
