I seem to be on a roll with these lists.
I read up a quite a great deal about this corporate menace, which like all other great ‘tools’ ends up sapping our energies when we give the tool more power than the person.
The TV became the bane of our civilization long back.
The Internet seems to be going down the same lane. Fast.
Anyway I promised myself that I will start writing shorter posts. My last 10 posts have been about 750 words on an average.
5 Predictions about the email (Which are already happening)
1. Emails will become open – And here I especially mean emails in companies. Multiple people ask us the same questions, use email as a tool for office politics, send us stinkers, request for information which we do not have, deftly delegate work, send meaningless forwards and subtly bitch about people/projects/bosses etc. The end result is that email, unless specifically addressed to everyone in the organization, becomes a closed information to & fro loop which takes up most of our time. We now endlessly manage information and relationships using email. However, imagine emails being open, unless personal, like social media. If everyone can see what you are writing about then they will trouble you lesser. Transparent systems naturally lead to more efficient processes.
2. Emails will have a word limit – As per company policy, employees will only be allowed emails of say 50 words maximum and depending on role/importance/situation may be allowed more words per emails in a certain number of emails only. This will ensure people say what is important and get out of your inbox.
3. Official Emails will stop after office hours – The No.1 destroyer of marriages, relationships and families isn’t infidelity any more. Its official email. If you are legally supposed to stop working at a particular time, then so should your emails. Companies will note that employees who have a certain amount of Me time and Family time, perform better.
4. Emails will become Gamified – You will get points and higher appraisal ratings depending on how well you use your email, how efficiently you are able to communicate, the number of words you use, the time it takes you to go through an email and how efficiently do you reply back to them. Your emails will get rated by your colleagues and bosses.
5. Finally, emails will be replaced with a form of Social Media – This follows from the first point, but is intense enough to warrant its own place on this list. Ever notice how most of our emails are marked to multiple people, how most of our emails are anyway being shared across the organization and how we still write replies without any collaboration even though mails are marked to so many of us? Now imagine your company working on a secure twitter? or Facebook? You can add people to circles based on requirements and functions just like Google+.
To be honest, most of this stuff is already happening. But it still has about 5-10 years to go, before any of this becomes substantial to change our lives and our emails.
Startup Yapper 