Emails - The Bane of Modern Communication

How many times have you emailed your colleagues or friends on something and found out much later that they had interpreted it differently causing friction, stress and even ending of friendships? Emails have long be toted as an instant and inexpensive way of communications. But in actual fact, the loss in productivity using Emails need to be studied carefully as it seemed that the flaws and problems outweigh the advantages of using Emails.

Why is it so? In modern communication, everyone is looking for speed and instantaneous communications. Emails are just a letter condensed into electronic form. Worse is that emails are often summarized till it is short and abrupt. An email may be construed very differently than if it is written in letter forms. In a world where lead times are getting shorter and shorter, composing detailed emails are often lost in the competition for speed and emails being an extremely impersonal type of communications does not really describe the feelings of the originator at all. Sometimes the receiver may misjudge what the originator meant and gave rise to communication issues which worsens as the emails exchange become more and more frequent and more and more vicious.

On a personal note, if I am out of the Internet business world, I may just stop using emails altogether. The above are reasons enough not to use emails for communications except for the most brief of instructions.

I am not neglecting the usefulness of emails, but just feeling that it has grown too much into part of our daily lives. It is estimated that the loss of productivity of employees on checking their emails can run into billions of dollars.

So how should we correct such a situation? Emphasized the areas where emails are effective. For eg simple instructions, routine announcements etc. Emphasized that emails is not for every type of communications, teach email users what is effective and what is not effective using emails as a form of communications. Let them know of the restrictions of emails. Emails can only do up to a certain level, personal communications face to face sometimes can never be substituted by emails alone.