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Technology is moving so fast that more specific guidance would be outdated by the time this book appears. And it’s not what you have — it’s what you do with it that counts.

4 E-Mail — the Great Mailbox in the Sky

There was Santa on the stage of New York’s Radio City Music Hall, reading Christmas letters and without making anything special of it, telling thousands of kids and grownups they can also reach him at Santa.com. And nobody blinked. (It was equally in character for him to stay in touch with the home office via mobile fax and cell phone.) We’ve moved from baby boomers to Generation X to generation.com.

Whether you count e-messages in billions or trillions, they’re replacing a lot of conventional mail. E-mail does things that letters or phone calls cannot do as well or cannot do at all. It is easy, fast, simple — and cheap. It’s perfect for quick answers, confirming plans, and short messages. It saves money on phone calls, messengers, and airfreight bills.

With e-mail, time zones go away. As does phone tag. If you do manage to connect on the phone, you are likely to interrupt whatever the other person is doing, even if it’s just thinking. With e-mail, you send at your convenience, the receiver picks up at his or hers.

E-mail helps organizations stay connected and react quickly.

All interoffice communications should flow over e-mail, preaches Bill Gates, “so workers can act on news with reflex-like speed.” He goes on to direct that meetings should not be used to present information: “It’s more effective to use e-mail.”

E-mail is changing rules of where we live and work. Instead of moving their families abroad, executives take up temporary residence in hotel rooms and become “virtual” expatriates with the aid of e-mail and cell phones. A generation.com — type cites the benefit of a permanent address: “Physical residence for people of my generation changes constantly, but my e-mail address will stay with me forever so people will always be able to communicate with me.”

Warning: E-mail can be addictive and create problems of its own. Its emphasis on speed conflicts with matters that deserve thought and reflection. There are times when nothing beats conversation to solve a problem, or when courtesy calls for a nicely typed or handwritten letter. Newcomers on-line, giddy with their discovery, want to broadcast to everyone. Garrulous bores find a large unwilling audience. People with a natural tendency to hide barricade themselves behind walls of e-mail, sending notes to people four desks away. More people send more superfluous thoughts to more people, creating a growing glut in the system. Busy executives tune out, delete, or simply don’t respond.

Time is the problem

The problem isn’t so much writing e-mail as receiving it. But that in turn presents a writing problem: how to get your e-mail read by busy people, and acted on.

A seatmate on the plane from New York to Dallas, a consultant, reported nine hundred unopened e-mails on his computer in the past ten months. It wasn’t laziness — he read and responded to e-mail for the better part of the flight. There was just so much of it that he had to be selective and ignore or delete all the obvious junk or apparent trivia that surrounded the important stuff.

Most executives receive fifty to one hundred or more e-messages a day; many receive up to four hundred. Assume half are easy to filter out and dismiss. Responding just to the important half, and initiating a couple of dozen messages, can take two to four hours a day. Every day. The flow never stops.

Planning time off for travel or vacation? Lots of luck! If you don’t pick up your messages, they pile up relentlessly, making your return to the office that much harder. The merciless flow forces deluged recipients to steal family time or sacrifice sleep, even pull out computers during meetings in moments when their attention isn’t required.

The time problem goes beyond e-mail. A Pitney Bowes survey shows the average U.S. office worker sends or receives 201 messages