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Showing items tagged with "pen and paper" - 8 found.

Articles of Note April 2016 – life after email

The death of the inventor of email prompted several authors and producers to reflect on not only the future of email but also letters.

1.  Ray Tomlinson – founder of email dies. Yes, email was invented over 30 years ago by a quiet modest man who wanted to write a simple messaging programme and choose the @ to denote where the sender was ‘at’ as in located. Perhaps not surprisingly he never became addicted to email!  But little did he realise it would be the cause of today’s most prevalent office disease – email overload.

2.  The future of email – the BBC put together a short piece for NewsNight about whether or not email will survive another 30 years. Probably, yes but hopefully we will be making better use of alternatives for both sharing and sending short ephemeral communications.

3.  What might the world with less email look like?  Alexandra Samuel provides a very good and practical insight and reviews the good and bad side of using alternatives to email and especially from the perspective of archiving material.

4.  Lost in digitisation? As if reading Alexandra’s thoughts, Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times questions what treasures will remain if we no longer either write with pen and paper or worse still use social media sights where the message/photo disappears once seen (like Snapchat). Will we still have any great letters and photos to help us form a picture of like in the 21^st Century as our forefather left us a century earlier?

And

5.  Stopping a potential email war. How does the response of ‘points noted’ strike you? Passive aggression or a very smart way to stop a potential email war?

6.  Email with no regrets.  Sadly an email sent is rarely if ever deleted.  There is always someone somewhere who will have kept a copy and produce it just when you least expected. Here are some tips on how to minimise if not obliterate the need to feel remorse after sending an email.

Tags: Alexandra Samuel, BBC, Email war, future of email, Pasive Aggression, pen and paper, Ray Tomlinson, Robert Shrimsley

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Articles of Note – September 2015

The holiday period was to some extent dominated by the Ashley Madison hacking and the havoc is wrecked for both organisations and individuals as summarized in this months blog and the on-going saga of Hilary Clinton’s emails sent on her personal account.  In between there was a piece we noted about Finland now teaching keyboard skills rather than cursive (joined-up) writing.

The Ashley Madison story 

1. Damaged reputations and one suicide are one outcome as hackers use the data to blackmail people.
2. Weak passwords make the hackers life easy to gain access to personal data.
3. Relationships are destroyed when those close to you find out what websites you have been visiting.
4. Never mind why you are accessing a dating website, what are the chances of find your partner there too?
5. You can never be sure that your data has removed and deleted as many found out even after paying to have their names removed.

Hilary Clinton email saga

1. Hilary Clinton deleted over 30,000 emails from her personal account.  Really? Platte River her email provider took no special measures to remove and as a result will now be able to recover them!  These old emails now looks set to blight her Presidential campaign.  This saga just underlines the adage ‘an email sent is there for life’ and about which we have blogged many times.

The keyboard overtakes cursive writing

1. Finish education authorities are to stop teaching joined up writing in favour of keyboard skills.  Surely there is room for both.  After all, one way to reduce email overload is to use pen and paper for saying thank you especially when the person has gone the extra mile. A hand written note carries so much more sincere.  (This is not an entirely new story and for those without a Times subscription click here for an alternative link.)

Tags: Ashley Madison, Cursive writing, email overload, Hilary Clinton, pen and paper, thank you emails

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Articles and Blogs of Note – April 2015

Over the past few weeks three themes have dominated – the resurgence of writing to reduce email overload, email scandals and cyber crime.

Articles of note

1. Hilary Clinton like Michael Gove used her personal email account for Government business.  Was it either naivety as she claims or like Gove an attempt to hide certain emails from public scrutiny?
2. A leaked memo suggested that Nicola Sturgeon was prepared to work with the Conservatives despite what she said in public.  The lesson from all these scandals is to use your personal email account only for personal emails and vet very carefully what you put in business emails before hitting send.
3. There have now been several examples of where people and organisations are reverting to writing to reduce email overload.  For a summary see our recent blog post –Is the writing on the wall for email?
4. A recent survey revealed that the cost of a breach of security is often less than the cost of the technology to protect properly your data.  So where is the incentive for companies to take cyber crime seriously when the biggest cost is usually personal reputational damage?

Tags: cyber crime, pen and paper, Writing

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Is the writing on the wall for email?

Several companies have now adopted writing as a way to reduce email overload according to a recent article by Emma De Vita in the Financial Times.  One company now uses notices board to post project updates rather than sending endless email chains.

From my own clients one uses whiteboards to post social and ephemeral notices such as ‘fire alarm tests’, ‘celebration cakes for tea’ etc.  They have whiteboards placed strategically around the office and messages can vary depending on what specific groups are doing.  One person said that an added benefit was how much you learn about what is going on in other parts of the department.

One business avoids endless email chains by writing their comments on documents and proposals.  Only when all parties have commented does the senior project manager then read the proposal.

Other clients encourage people to rebuff requests to ‘send me an email’.  Instead they tell the person making the request to take ownership and write down what is being asked of them.

We are seeing a great resurgence in traditional writing tools such as pen and paper.  What novel ways such as these have you used to help reduce email overload?

Tags: alternatives to email, pen and paper, Reduce email overload

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Email – will it survive 2015?

A year from now, will we still be using email as the prima face business communications tool?  That is the question I am always asked at this time of year.  In a word ‘yes’.  It is not only the most durable technological innovation, but in essence it has changed little in its thirty year life cycle.  It is still a lean and mean messaging system, all be it we have bent it to be all things to all people, (from a channel through which to manage people, make them redundant and invite them for sex tonight).   However, here are five things I do foresee with respect to email which may also help reduce email overload.

The future of email

1. The trend towards pen and paper will continue and especially as upmarket fountain pens and beautiful writing paper become objects of desire.
2. Increasingly people will disconnect whilst on leave and after working hours following the example set in 2014.
3. Pull rather than push information cultures will be more common as organisations switch to using social media and internal discussion forums to replace email conversations and share knowledge quickly.
4. Email software such as Unified Inbox which can aggregate your electronic messages will come of age (from email to social media messages).
5. Standards of email etiquette will improve as organisations seek ways to limit the fall out from cyber crime attacks like the Sony one.

Consequently, email overload may become less of a drain on people’s productivity as we learn to change our email behaviour. However, it will be important not to replace one set of bad behaviours with another.  A change in email behaviour needs to be carefully managed and we at Mesmo Consultancy will be pleased to share how with you how we have helped other organisations make this transition.

Where do you feel we will be with email by the end of 2015?  Will it still be the dominant backbone of  business communications?

Tags: cyber crime, disconnect on leave, Email behaviour, email overload, Mesmo Consultancy, pen and paper, Unified inbox

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