Email Will Never Be The Same – All Dressed Up and Everywhere To Go

Forward by Gerry Riskin of Edge International

Richard Upton is a savvy guru to the professions – he comes from the creative side but he understands and serves major law firms. In this piece, Richard helps us understand that an individual’s professional email has the potential to be more useful and friendly to the recipient and therefore a much more powerful tool to the firm that uses it. Somehow after seeing this, email simply seems undressed (or perhaps under- dressed). Give this some thought in your organization. If you want to explore this further, contact Richard directly (see his email address at the end of the piece).

Tell the truth. Has email improved your life? As a business leader, can you honestly say that you, your organization and your employees are more productive, or less, because you can send and receive instantaneous communications, day or night, from anywhere in the world? Do you have more time to devote to important matters, or less?

I know what the answer was supposed to be. Just a few years ago– when people were so ga-ga about email that they affixed happy-face icons to their messages-email was going to make everything in our workday lives easier, faster and more efficient. Instead, we find ourselves more “time-famished,” as I like to call it, than ever before.

Executives typically receive 100 or more emails per day. Some of us spend as much as four hours each day just managing the volume of email, with no let-up in sight. (Forty-one percent of Americans surveyed last year by America Online/Opinion Research said they check their email before going to work; 4 percent check their messages in the bathroom.)