G'day! Thanks for returning!
Okay, so this is going to be a rant and also a stream-of-consciousness ‘thinking out aloud’ piece…
I am tired of email.
I am tired of 99% of the 300+ emails I get a day being either spam or stuff that could be delivered to me another way.
I am tired of spending over 3+ hours a day playing ‘email tag’ with clients and prospects and colleagues.
I am tired of finding important emails from clients, prospects and friends buried deep in the ‘spam’ folders weeks after they sent them to me.
There is a group over on Facebook that is also saying email’s time is up, and they are the inspiration for this post (blame them!).
Neville Hobson put me on to the group as I saw via my Facebook ‘news’ that he had joined them; I wandered over, liked what I saw and joined too.
Neville in the latest edition of FIR said that they were a tongue-in-cheek group; I’m not so sure, mate. Shel said that he wasn’t going to give up email any time soon, if only simply because of client demand for it.
As I pointed out in my report, if clients or prospects want to get hold of me they can, easily. I have my phone numbers all over my website and my blog. If I can’t take the call they can leave a message on the voicemail system and I will call them back.
This evening a good colleague of mine, Stuart Symons from Santos, rang me to organise drinkies with himself and the wonderful Catriona Byrne. Rang me. Because it was quicker and more efficient than email. Rang me and I answered and we did the dealing there and then, over the phone.
No email chain, no being lost in the spam filter.
I’m not asking prospects to clamber through hoops to get hold of me. I’m not expecting clients to give up their existing tool (email). I may still keep ONE email account active (a Gmail one, because so far I don’t get any spam on that, but then again only two dozen real people (not ‘bots’) in the world know of it) so that clients, prospects and suppliers can send me material ONCE I ASK THEM TO.
I may well use that email address like a one-time letter pad, so that each new encounter needs a new email address and no one clogs up my inbox unnecessarily.
Note the ‘may’. I haven’t said I will.
But I am seriously tempted…
Aside and as an injection of humour into an otherwise angry post: As I said to an undergraduate class last week who are fed up with spam on their hotmail accounts, I want to know how it is that spammers know so much about me. Before I was married all my spam mail was about spending time watching Swedish twins Helga and Ingrid doing things that Swedish twins obviously do on a rainy afternoon when Ikea is closed. Now all I get is email about cialis, viagra, weight loss and penis extension kits.
