I’m happy to say that I’m not addicted to e-mail. Or at least I don’t think I am.

However, I’ve come to realize that communicating through email is preferred to picking up the telephone by a fairly large margin. In fact, I actually prefer it as it lets me keep a written record of communication, not necessarily for legal purposes, but for organizational purposes.

During a typical day, I get so focused on the job at hand that if you want me to do something, you better send me an email. Why? Because in the process of verbally adding a task to my list, you’ve probably interrupted the process of closing another one out. Chances are, I didn’t stop long enough to divert my brain from what it’s focused on to what you’re requesting of it. Consequently, the response is: “Sure thing, could you send that to me in an email?”

Since most of my work occurs away from my desk, my laptop is dedicated to receiving task requests and discriminately prioritizing the requests in chronological order. It’s a beautiful system I have set up, and it works rather well. Unless of course you’re the one that has so rudely interrupted me and asked me to add one more thing to my list, thereby doing an end run on my system!

Lucky for me, my company has not found it necessary to issue my a BlackBerry. I consider myself lucky because I see the crack-berry effect on those who do have a PDA strapped to their hip. They just never turn it off!

Weekend Work

I’ve made it a practice not to check work email on the weekend, and at least if I do, not to respond to any.

It seems that management at some companies are seeing the evil ways of the email, and are striving to add clarity to the line between work and personal life. In fact, employees at PricewaterhouseCoopers caught logging in to their email system on weekends are met with a popup window indicating that it is, in fact, the weekend, and not to overload yourself with email.

I think it’s a good policy. After all, if you can’t get it done between Monday and Friday, what’s another couple days?

What say you? Are you addicted to email? Any organization tips?

Tags: email | work

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