A day without email

Could you survive it? You would if you worked for U.S. Cellular. From NPR:

U.S. Cellular Vice President and COO Jay Ellison says his ban on Friday e-mails at the Chicago-based company came after he heard complaints from employees. But it wasn’t a cakewalk.

“I got a lot of push-back from a lot of people that I was nuts they’d have to operate that way, and I pushed back on them,” Ellison said. “I respect that push-back,” he told them. “But I heard the associates; we’re going to try this.”

Ellison says the company tried it for two and a half months, and everyone loved it — even those who didn’t like the idea at first.

I’m old enough to remember when you heard from coworkers in one of three ways. They came to your door and said, “Hey, got a minute?” Or they called you. Or a memo - they were sort of like email messages, but they came on physical pieces of paper - would show up in your inbox - which was sort of like your email inbox, but it was a physical box on your desk. (Weird, huh? Don’t get me started about walking ten miles to school in the snow, you whippersnappers.)

Yes, I prefer having email. But there is one thing that got lost in the move to electronical communication, and that was good prioritization.

If you got a memo, it meant that this was something significant, but didn’t need a response that moment. If someone came to your door, it meant they wanted to have a conversation, and they wanted to have it soon. Same for a phone call.

Email is still, for too many of us, a giant wave of things demanding our attention.

At U.S. Cellular, people have learned to function without email one day a week - and even made some interesting discoveries:

Ellison says the idea is for employees to talk to one another and collaborate more. Along the way, some staffers, like executive John Coyle, have made some amazing discoveries.

Coyle says that one Friday, he was about to send an e-mail to a colleague in the finance department whom he had never met. But he called him instead.

That’s when the two realized they had similar phone numbers — meaning that not only were they in the same town, but in the same building.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, really, where?’ He said, ‘On the fourth floor,’ ” Coyle remembers. “And I said, ‘I’m on the fourth floor.’ ”

After more details were exchanged, “I literally got up, walked around the corner and there he was. I had no idea.”

Instead of making email abstinence a weekly thing, though, how about making email intelligence an ongoing thing? It’s an interesting exercise to ask yourself two questions before hitting send, every time:

• Does everyone I’m sending this to need it?
• Does sending this by email match the communications style of this person, or will I get what I want more effectively by calling?

And as a recipient, here is something fun to try: turn off your email client. Just turn it off. And then make checking email something you do at various times throughout the day. Instead of the barrage of interruptions, you can look at email, then close it and concentrate on something else - really concentrate. Then you can look at email again, turn it off, and move on to something else. Repeat throughout the day as needed.

Then maybe no-email-Fridays wouldn’t even be needed.

---

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader. If you don't have a feed reader, you can always have these articles delivered to your email inbox every day. Click here to sign up.

The Opinionated Marketers | Powered by WordPress | ElegantBlue is a custom theme by Nathan Rice