Email's role in our business lives is back in the news, thanks in part to the claims on behalf of Steve Cohen, the CEO of SAC Capital, that he may have missed a crucial warning because he is deluged with 1,000 email messages per day. The company is under indictment for insider trading.
In New York, Jennifer Senior writes, “… in the abstract, the idea that Cohen couldn’t keep pace with the furious activity in his in-box doesn't feel like a stretch. Even those of us without a Hamptons estate and an estimated net worth of $9.3 billion regard our email in the same way Mickey Mouse viewed that army of brooms and buckets in Fantasia’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice“: an unstoppable force that will soon drown us.”
Nevertheless, as I've commented before, email retains its importance in a business setting. Senior criticizes “our reliance on something so time-consuming, enervating, and maddeningly inefficient when we could all dispense with our most basic tasks—and coordinate them, for that matter—with a brief phone call?”
Really? Here's the problems with phone calls—they need to be handled in real-time (they don't work if both, or all, in the case of conference calls, parties are not available). You don't get a written record of what was said. Misunderstandings are common. (The “telephone” game is called that for a reason.)
Senior cites a 2012 study from McKinsey Global Institute noting that the average worker in the knowledge economy spends 28% of his or her time reading and answering e-mail. But without email, how much time would be spent with telephone calls and snail mail?
She continues, “Emails, after all, are disruptive. It takes start-up energy to read them; it takes energy to reorient and reboot once we’re returned to the task we’ve left. Over the course of a week, the price can be measured in hours.”
It seems to me she is misusing email. It need not be disruptive for people who can check their accounts at scheduled times. Truly, phone calls are disruptive. They must be attended to immediately—requiring reorientation and rebooting once we've hung up.
Senior even points out potential physiological effects, such as email apnea. Such effects are certainly worth study and suggest the need for discipline in dealing with our incoming streams of messages. (A study by Harris Interactive, she writes, indicates that 9% of email users check for messages during religious services.) Nevertheless, email strikes me as a much more efficient means of communication, in most cases, than the alternatives.