e-mail free Fridays?

One thing I have learnt is how hard it is to get people to respond...

According to the sociologist Stanley Milgram, everyone in the world can be reached through a short chain of social acquaintances. The world is certainly getting smaller and smaller and more interconnected with the advances in digital networks and mobile communications. However as our inboxes clog, and the superhighway of digital bits and bytes draws us ever closer we must be careful that we don’t lose the personal, the face to face, the people bit of what we do.

As you know I love e-mail; it’s efficient and effective but totally impersonal, lacking emotion, inflection and intent and dangerous because it is open to misunderstanding and mistrust. I read over the weekend that even our colleagues at Intel the chip makers get fed up with e-mail and they have decided to have an e-mail free Friday in the hope that it will cut down traffic by 20%. So why don’t we try it. Every Friday let’s use email as little as possible. Let’s pick up the phone, walk along the corridor, climb the stairs and make it a day where we all talk to each other. After all conversation makes us what we are.
Chris