Basex blog - worth reading

I subscribe to the weekly Basex newsblast on information overload and other stuff relating to productivity in the modern economy. I commented on their blog recently. Worth a read.

Email management fragmentation - the problem persists

So here's the gig. The approach to addressing the modern problem of email management for the white collar worker boils down to the simple reality that people need to make a decision about their next actions resulting from having received an email and then acting upon or recording that next action for future attention. No more, no less. Scooting around You Tube on an email management search just now, I came across this video which is a neat tool and certainly of value but by no means the solution. Actually, its pretty indicative of products and services that simply miss the point.

This is what happens when you think it through for yourself

In a Smartbiz article, Brian Murphy discusses the five most common email-management mistakes that businesses are making today:

1. Believing it is feasible to run your business without some form of email-management system.

2. Destroying email by auto purges or mailbox caps. This contravenes record-keeping policies and obligations across many legal compliance and business risk-management fronts.

3. Using backups as an archive. The problem with this approach is that un-indexed email records are difficult and expensive to search, especially when the request for such records is typically mission- or business-risk-critical.

4. Assuming that existing document-management systems are an acceptable technology to handle email archiving. The volume and indexing challenges for email archiving across an enterprise are substantially different from standard document-management challenges.

5. Implementing an email retention policy that was optimized for paper. Email is not paper. The classification processes used for paper simply don't work with email because:

• The sheer volume of email exchanged makes it impractical to classify everything;
• Everyone uses email;
• The administration of email isn't easily delegated, and
• There's an almost infinite number of possible classification criteria, making it impractical for end users to classify all of their messages.