Email: Scourge of Humanity or Business Essential?

My company's email has been down since sometime Tuesday evening. I'm typing this Thursday morning, so its been 30 hours or more without business email. Apparently, we don't keep our inboxes cleaned out, we filled up three servers and one of them finally crashed and completely shut down our system. Our IT folks are trying to migrate some of the email over to new servers, but anything that was sent to me since Tuesday night is lost. This morning, there's a workaround using our spam filter, which is helpful, but not ideal.

The first few hours of yesterday were nice. I set out a schedule for my morning and was able to follow it without interruption. By lunch time though, I began to worry about what I'm missing. Among other things, I have a 430,000 GSF, $220M project under construction. The team is large and the emails fly, so I was sure I was missing things. By 2:00P, consultants and clients were calling saying my email was bouncing back to them. By 5:30P, the situation seemed ludicrous. By this morning, it is untenable, even with the work around. I'm uncertain that I'm seeing everything plus I have to manually type in email addresses to send through the spam filter, so mistakes are frequent.

We rely too much on email. Sure, its an easy way to make declarative statements and send those statements out to many people on the project team. It generally leaves a trail that can be filed and searched. However, there are too many variables, too many different systems, too many ways for it to fail. It is simply not a reliable way to communicate. If you need to have a discussion that is truly a two-way street, that cannot be adequately accomplished through email.

Now, the ludicrous and untenable situation is reaching a hilarious point. I actually received this email today:

Marvin,

I keep getting error messages about this email. Did you receive it before?

Thanks,  

Yes, this came from a 20-something member of the large project team. I'm off-site this morning but I just checked my voicemail and there was no voicemail from this person; they emailed rather than picking up the phone and calling. This is where the "scourge of humanity" comes in: if you're getting email bounced back, why would you send an email asking if I received the bounced back email? Why wouldn't you pick up the phone and call me?

I gave a presentation last summer at CONSTRUCT 2014 and the CSI National Convention on collaboration. The one line that resonated most with those in the room was "Communicate More, Email Less." More people came up to me and mentioned that line and how much they wish everyone felt the same way. Yesterday and I today I have had great phone conversations and face to face discussions, all without email. Perhaps we should all go without email for a few days and remember what it used to be like.