Email Overload

I just returned from 4 days leave in New Caledonia (yes it was very hot and relaxing!) However, today I decided to get on top of my email before I head back to the office tomorrow. Once Outlook sync'd up I had 329 emails. While sometimes I average over 200 emails/day, 80/day while on leave was quite a surprise! I read once that email generates email, and I have had first hand experience that the more I send the more I receive - and fortunately the less I sent also resulted in less received. All in all, not too sure how I received 80+ emails/day when I wasn't sending any. Anyway this reminded me of a post I recently read discussing the idea of an email charter:

Houston, we have a problem. We all love the power of email connecting people across continents. But... we're drowning in it. Every year it gets a little worse. To the point where we can get trapped spending most of our working week simply handling the contents of our in-boxes. And in doing so, we're making the problem worse. Every reply, every cc, creates new work for our friends and colleagues. We need to figure out a better way. But how? Here is the key cause of this problem: The total time taken to respond to an email is often MORE than the time it took to create it.

The full post is definitely worth a read and to date there have been over 200 responses. The overall result of the post has been the creation of http://emailcharter.org/