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Organizing
Letters and E-mails
E-mails have only
been an official tool of the workplace since the mid 90s.
However, the media philosopher Marshall McLuhan seemed to
be referring to them in the 60s when he said, “We shape
the tools and they in turn shape us.”
E-mails were designed
to make us more productive. We can send and receive information
at the touch of a button. We can write joint reports with
people in other offices – or even countries. If someone
is “on the road,” no problem. We’ll just
send him an e-mail and expect a reply within a few hours.
And we can ignore time zones. They are no longer a communications
problem.
Moreover, if we
think of an idea or a problem to address when office hours
are over, we can pull out our laptops/Blackberries and handle
it immediately.
But McLuhan was
right. This productivity tool is also shaping us. There is
more stress in the workplace today because of e-mails. People
are overusing them — sending both relevant and irrelevant
messages with little thought. The number one complaint people
have with e-mails is that there are just too many. In fact,
handling e-mails has added one hour to the workday. (If you
did the math of this, you’ll be amazed at how much of
a company’s corporate payroll goes toward the handling
of e-mails.)
Part of the problem
with e-mails is that business people have not been officially
trained on how and when to use e-mails. They don’t know
how to mange their inboxes. And they have not been taught
that the rules for letters do not work for e-mails, nor do
they understand that tone is much more important with e-mails
than with other forms of writing.
E-mails are a wonderful
tool. But they are forcing us to think outside the standard
writing/organizing boxes we have previously relied on for
business communications.
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