Listen to your CEO. On Twitter

A couple of days before he made bigger news by getting fired, then penning a cheeky letter to the troops letting them know what just happened, then-no-former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, perhaps knee-deep in a frustrating Email session posted this Tweet: 

Possible to write a gmail script to autoreply & bounce emails longer than fifty words?

— Andrew Mason (@andrewmason) February 25, 2013

Perhaps an extreme approach to dealing with Email and message length overload, but entirely out of the realm of useful utilities. We hate and need Email at the same time. I'd say for 99% of the people reading this post, Email is the single most important means of communication in your professional lives.

Don't think so?

Just try to go a day, week, month without Email. You can't do it.

You can forget Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn (at least until you need to look for a new job), literally for weeks and weeks and it probably won't really matter. Try that trick with email and you will probably get fired, lose business, or get reported to the police as a missing person.

But the point of this post isn't another 'email is horrible' riff, rather it is to call out a response to the former Groupon CEO's tweet, from a Groupon engineer no less, that was sent exactly one hour and one minute after Mason's original Tweet:

@andrewmason got something working: gist.github.com/rboyd/5027691 -- just customize variables to suit and schedule to run on a timer.

— Robert Boyd (@rboyd) February 25, 2013

Pretty amazing and awesome, and perhaps instructive as a clever method of sucking up getting the bosses attention in this new Age of Social Media. I have no idea if before he was ousted at Groupon if Mason had any kind of relationship, or even knowledge of Mr. Boyd - but let's pretend for a moment that they did not, and Mason (at that time), was the CEO and Boyd was just one of the rank-and-file staff working away, and personally invisible to Mason.

What better way to get on the big bosses radar than answering his Twitter question, within an hour, with a solution that works - and in the middle of the night?

Just another item to add to your bag of tricks as you try and climb up, over, or around the corporate ladder. If your CEO is on Twitter you ought to follow him/her. And maybe just maybe you can help your own career in the process.

What a Year's Worth of Email Can Teach You

Email. A burden. A time-suck. An endless stream of incoming messages, some batted back, some ignored, some discarded, most forgotten. But still a necessary and important tool for getting work done today, two decades after its introduction into our working lives.

And despite dramatic and continuing popularity and value provided by alternate forms of electronic communication, (SMS, social networks, enterprise collaboration technologies), email, for most information workers, remains the dominant digital collaboration and discussion medium. We hate it but we can't live without it. Kind of like Reality TV or Facebook.

But for a tool that is so dominant in many of our professional endeavors, we often have little insight into how we use the tool, and how our usage might be effecting our success, productivity, and career prospects. We know we use email a lot, perhaps even all day long, and we can see how many unread messages we have in our Inbox, but after that, the level of understanding about a communication and work platform is typically extremely limited.

That's why a new service from ToutApp is so interesting, an 'Email Year in Review' report that provides, in a neat little infographic, a rich look into an entire year's worth of email traffic, messages, response rates and more. My full report of Gmail usage from 2011 is here, (a small sample of the full infographic is below).

 

Other sections of the report dig into most frequent correspondents, most commonly emailed 'circles' or groups of recipients, and some interesting chronilogical data around email usage. Did you find that last Spring's project missed its deadline by a few weeks? Could have had at least something to do with a spike in email traffic right around the critical Go-live? Or do you find yourself mainly pushing email all day long, forcing you to do 'real work' late at night or on weekends? If you are like me, you will probably be surprised by at least some of the data from a year's worth of email.

Currently the Email Year in Review is only available for Gmail accounts, so its usefulness for most corporate employees will be limited, but for frequent Gmail users the report is illuminating, and for all of us that are interested in improving performance and collaboration both personally and inside our organizations, the approach to analyzing the data is instructive.

Email is one of those tools and processes that is so familiar, so entrenched, so deeply immersed in our working lives that it can be really hard to look at its use dispassionately, with some perspective, and with an analytical eye. But understanding more about how email might be impacting your success is something many of us should spend some time considering.

If you are a heavy Gmail user, I'd encourage you to request your own custom email analysis report from ToutApp here. You might be surprised at the results.

Don't send that Email!

Some months back I posted about the Technology Services company Atos Origin's plan to eliminate the use of internal email as a tool for communication for its $10B plus organization. Well yesterday additional news about the 'Email Elimination' plan were released, a good summary of the news can be found on this piece from Yahoo!News.Email Jail

From the Yahoo! piece on Atos', (really Atos CEO Thierry Breton's), take on how Email is throttling internal productivity, the ability to find information, and to actually be effective at its main purpose - communicating.

Breton,  the French finance minister from 2005 to 2007, told the Wall Street Journal he has not sent an email in the three years since he became chairman and CEO of Atos in November 2008.

“We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives,” he said in a statement when first announcing the policy in Feburary. “At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.”

The company says by 2013, more than half of all new digital content will be the result of updates to, and editing of existing information. Middle managers spend more than 25 percent of their time searching for information, according to the company.

While the details of the plan have not seemed to change much since I first posted about this in February of this year, what is notable is that nine months later Breton and Atos still seem as committed to the 'no internal email' policy as ever.

And as I asked readers back in February, I will ask again today, (a question that might be particularly pointed for USA readers still digging out from email jail after a long holiday):

Could you actually work without (internal) email?

Could a company of any scale and size at all successfully manage information, workflow, communication, and so on without sending ANY internal email?

How many of you are thinking it might be nice to work for Atos right about now?