Email is its very own phenomena. It was designed to share very short pieces of text. It has since grown exponentially in terms of what is shared and how. Email brings lots of frustration as well. Different people have different expectations. We can’t fix all of what is fundamentally broken with email, but here are a couple of reminders about email access through Dearborn Public :
- must be used for official business
- must not be used to send out personal information
- please be thoughtful about email. Once one starts receiving too much, very little attention is paid to it.
As a point of reference, I recently received the email below from an employee. I’m sure that this is not the only person frustrated by the amount of email that we now deal with.
I was wondering if you could tell me who the last word in the school district is regarding how the Email system is used? I don’t know what … is going on this year, but I’m walking into work every day and spending like a half hour sifting through emails about sports tickets for sale, little Sophia jewelry parties thrown by teachers, and just a bunch of “thank god its almost Friday” type banter. … its getting so bad, I am missing out on the few important emails nestled between all the bull crap blanket deleting all the garbage.
We work to filter the SPAM that comes from outside the district (yes, I’m aware that some does make it through, but it is pretty impressive of how much we catch), but we have no way of filtering the “SPAM” that is generated by our own users.
Here are some additional thoughts about email:
- Some research has been done which indicates that workers spend 28% of their work day dealing with email.
- Respect your recipients’ time
- Keep it short
- Be wise about CC’ing
Email is a great tool. However, not everybody views email the same way. We can easily spend way too much time on email and not enough time getting other work done. Remember, just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.