It is time for the top leadership in organizations of all sizes to recognize that an ad-hoc approach to managing e-mail is highly inefficient and an enormous drag on human resources.  E-mail management: the prioritization, planning and archiving of e-mail, should be systemized and standardized in every organization.

The perennial challenge of how to structure and re-structure the processing of e-mail has been relentlessly unrewarding at best.

Clearly, the most important prerequisites to improving a dependable system are, first, actually having a system, and second, having a system that you implicitly trust.  Confidence in the integrity of the system is of paramount importance.  Without it we are tempted to believe that our system is situational rather than consistently stable.

Imagine if you could only rely upon your partner when he or she was in a calm state.  When things heated up the rules you agreed upon were subjugated by their selfish need to get their own short-term needs met.  Even if we know of couples that have endured this type of a relationship for years, we can all imagine that it would be far from blissfully ideal.  Instead of having a clear framework in place in order to maintain a healthy caring relationship, a pseudo-framework undermines any hope for stability and trust.  Now let’s apply this thinking to an area of our lives where a stable and reliable system is conspicuously missing: our management of e-mail.

The typical Outlook veteran has changed their way of managing their e-mail any number of times due to the difficulties they endure with the ever-growing problem of increased volume and complexity of e-mail. The perennial challenge of how to structure and re-structure the processing of e-mail has been relentlessly unrewarding at best.  Many of us have spent many hours, consciously or not, devising new ways to make sense out of how to apply a series of rules, filters and folders only to abandon them one by one for yet a better, simpler, clearer method that is hopefully more efficient and less stressful.  In the end hands are thrown up in the inevitable realization, again, that “this will have to do for now”.

Just imagine the number of hours that are spent by individual R&D gurus, like you, boldly exploring the bowels of MS Outlook in search of that homerun solution.  Hours float by as you test this and that method.  Wanting to improve, as you do, you justify this time spent as an important time-saving measure.

At some point, however, just as the older generation stops listening to pop music or buying the latest trendy fashions, we resign ourselves to the fact that most of the improvements we’ve made have been short-lived and the ones that have stuck are mainly still there because, well, we have a hard time justifying spending more time on something that won’t be more satisfactory anyway.

Isn’t there someplace or someone to turn to in order to get a fix on this?  The available publications on the subject are either so complicated that you wonder if the author really takes her own medicine, or too basic and out of touch with reality in their approaches.

The answer, as you may have surmised from the title of this article, lies not in a few good tips from hip DIY authors or gleaned from Internet sites promising more of the same elixirs.  Instead, we need to eliminate the complacency that is rife in top management about this subject in order to come to real terms with the challenge and thereby unleash a hidden source of profitability on a scale of staggering proportions.

We are living in a technopolitical age where IT departments are focused on savings and unification while knowledge workers are drowning in information overload – often due to extreme inefficiency in synchronous and asynchronous communication and document handling. Top management seems to be looking the other way, ostensibly with the perception that, well… if it ain’t broke don’t fix it;a prime example of good being the enemy of great.

The truth is that e-mail management is broke and in order to fix it we need to systemize and then standardize the processing of e-mail.

Most of the C-level executives that I have worked with have far less difficulty managing their e-mail than that of their subordinates because most of what they do in their inbox is delegate to others or make immediate decisions. After all, that is what C-level executives to do in order to earn their keep.

E-mail overload is, as Forbes Magazine stated in 2008, the leading cause of preventable productivity loss in organizations today.[1]  Note here that Forbes didn’t claim e-mail overload as one of the leading causes of preventable productivity loss but THE leading cause.  So why does the clear dismissal of this warning silently resound in most every board room?

I believe that the complacency originates from the fact that most of our top leaders either refuse to believe what Forbes and other reputable sources such as the Radicati Group and Basex are claiming due to the skewed lens from their experience at the top or they are unaware that a new LEAN-based work-flow methodology for processing e-mail exists. (Plausible since it is relatively new solution) But it is also my experience that management rarely gets wind of the opportunity because before it reaches a strategic level the potential solution is delegated to the IT department instead of being recognized as a business development opportunity. The value proposition – increased profitability through applying proven LEAN techniques to communications and information management is thus presented to those whose world is about reducing storage costs, enabling cross-platform communication, migration and lowering helpdesk visits. Why would IT want to take on more work that doesn’t correspond with their mandates when they are not even able to handle their current demands?