Productivity

The Corrosive Effect of E-Mail

E-mail was intendend to make work easier. In fact, the simple communication corrodes structured workflows and becomes the work itself.

In com­plex social sys­tems, tech­nol­o­gy always unfolds unex­pect­ed side effects. When IBM intro­duced an inter­nal e‑mail sys­tem in the 1980s, the very high cost of com­put­ing pow­er at the time made it nec­es­sary to ana­lyze very pre­cise­ly how peo­ple were com­mu­ni­cat­ing with mem­os and phone calls. It was assumed that this com­mu­ni­ca­tion would shift to the e‑mail sys­tem and, based on this, the main­frame com­put­er was gen­er­ous­ly sized. Nev­er­the­less, the sys­tem was already mas­sive­ly over­loaded in the first weeks. ( Cal New­port, When Tech­nol­o­gy Goes Awry. In: Com­mu­ni­ca­tions of the ACM, May 2020, Vol. 63 №5).

Because it was so much eas­i­er to com­mu­ni­cate via e‑mail, employ­ees obvi­ous­ly used this tech­nol­o­gy much more than one would have expect­ed for their actu­al work. This would also be under­stand­able if this addi­tion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion had been nec­es­sary or at least ben­e­fi­cial for their actu­al work. Unfor­tu­nate­ly this was not the case. In his arti­cle, Cal New­port quotes Adri­an Stone, an engi­neer on the team respon­si­ble for…