I caught the BBC’s article on email overload this morning. The article points out that two million e-mails are sent every minute in the UK. That is almost three billion each day.
But what is the real cost of this information overload, they ask? Apparently one UK-based firm estimated that dealing with pointless e-mails cost it £39m a year.
Everyone knows it’s a problem. Everyone hates trying to filter through hundreds of emails a day. So what to do?
Lots of organizations are now considering email-free days, as the article points out. We’ve tried to encourage our clients to adopt social media tools as an alternative to email, but the culture of email is so deeply ingrained that it will take most organizations years to convince their employees to adopt wikis in a bid to thwart occupational spam. So perhaps more draconian measures are warranted.
There was a fairly radical suggestion posed at our Government 2.0 conference in Washington on Wednesday. New Paradigm colleague Nick Bontis suggested a one-cent tax on every email sent. For a variety of reasons, I’m sure its totally unworkable. The financial and political costs of collecting the tax, for example, could very well exceed the revenue it generates. Or would it? The UK government would stand to gain about £3 million in tax revenue every day, which it could redirect to good causes like closing the digital divide and increasing literacy rates.
Anyways, I’d like to hear your proposals for getting out of email jail.
