E-mail is a heavily-utilized communication tool in the workplace. We all use it. Many of us have spent countless minutes (or hours) customizing our signatures, fonts and colors. Some of us even update our signatures regularly with little quotes or anecdotes.

But e-mail, while a great communication tool, has led to great inefficiencies in the workplace.

When I draft an e-mail at work, I typically want to make sure it goes out to all interested parties; therefore, I usually send or CC it to one or more e-mail distribution lists. Often, a couple recipients will exchange a few Reply-All’s back to the group to discuss a few details between each other, in essence filling the Inboxes of the other recipients with unnecessary e-mail trails. This happens a lot at my job. I get tons of e-mail, some of which I care about. Some is just informational, or FYI. But each time, I am pulled away from whatever task I am working on to check my e-mail just in case.

Case in point: I sent an e-mail to my team’s DL regarding a question about some server configurations that needed to be applied to one of our vendor products. Obviously, it wasn’t necessary to send it to the whole team. In reality, it only needed to go out to the admin and probably my team lead. The developers could have cared less. But I wanted to make sure they were aware of it in case they had issues with their software.

This is where a practice like Daily Meetings has huge benefits. At these daily, 15-minute meetings, each member of the team has the opportunity to mention what they have been working on and bring it to the attention of the group. Keep in mind, however, that further discussion between a subset of the group should not occur during the meeting (since that would lead to the same inefficiencies as the mass e-mail distribution); instead, hold a separate meeting/discussion immediately following the meeting.

(Note: While drafting this post, I found it ironic that I got a “Mailbox is over its size limit” message from the Exchange Server…)