What do you think of emails as a means of communication?

[Parallel]

Emails are a very powerful mean of communication – within seconds posted to almost every place round the world! Just in time communication for 24 / 7…
But this is not allways an advantage.

First of all the shear number of emails can be a real problem today! I don’t speak of spam mails, they can be reduced to a very small number by an appropriate firewall, but all the rest! It has become so easy to send a short message by email, that a lot of people write one immediately when they can’t let’s say solve a problem right-away. And you are expected to answer them within minutes! If you don’t, they will call you back to remind you in a reproaching tone about your duty!
I wonder what time it takes for each one of us per day to deal with that sort of emails! It’s also likely that you miss an important one between loads of others...

But more importantly you receive tasks and orders on very short notice.
Ten or fifteen years ago it was clear, that everyone had to do his own work in the first place, instead of allways answering emails in a jiffy. When there was a question, you got a phone call. You could answer it right-away or say how much time you needed to reply. If you knew, that the phone caller had unpleasant or impossible tasks in store for you, you could even tell your secretary not to be available.
There’s no way to do this when you get an email. Once received, you have to react…

And what’s the situation when you start a new task for someone today? A couple of years ago, you got the information needed smoothly bundled up so that you could start your work with all the relevant facts and wishes of your client or business partner. Nowadays no one thinks it to be necessary to go into details when starting a new task - additional information can be posted at any time afterwards by email.
But this has the negative effect that a client or partner does not think thoroughly what you really need to know for being able to do the job properly, and what information is crucial for you to get straight to the right result. So you send something back and then you often have to redo your work!

Sometimes I wonder how our fathers and grandfathers managed to achieve their goals without all those means of communication we dispose of today. But they succeded and often under very difficult circumstances! I even dare to say that a lot of work nowadays is not done more efficiantly than in the old days, but takes in fact the double time - BECAUSE of our superb means of communication. What a pity! That has certainly a great deal to do with human nature – another topic to discuss?
Urs