Which is pretty funny. But the growth in volume suggests that email usage will continue to grow at 4-5%, above the rate of inflation. Given everything people with jobs are expected to do, it is impossible to keep up.
The interesting question is why. Computer usage is down. Texting and its various offshoots are arguably more popular. The presumptive reasoning is that because it's free, and because people in organizations like to cover themselves by copying half the office on emails of only passing consequence, the cost-benefit of sending rather than not weighs heavily towards inclusiveness.
But experience suggests there may be another factor responsible for the growing volume. It is that as a society we value the distance that texting or emailing provides. People text more than they talk on their mobile devices. To the point where calling them phones seems a misnomer. We like the emotional cushion that remove provides us. It enables us to avoid discomfort and controversy, to keep our feelings at a safe distance from those who may hurt them or whose own feelings we may rub wrong.
The problem is that texting is inconvenient for anything other than the most basic messaging. It is not efficient or effective for delivering the more subtle and comprehensive disquisitions sometimes required for modern adult interaction. So we pour our feelings, intellect and strategic imperatives into email instead of picking up the phone or scheduling a meeting. Message delivered - and we didnt have to listen to all those counter-arguments that would just annoy us - and slow us down.
So, the challenge is cultural and societal. We want what we want. We sort of like socializing but we are no longer have the patience for - or are particularly good at - sharing. We hide behind our devices both to get our way and to avoid the unpleasant. Like every form of communication, it comes with a cost. In this case, email volumes are up and the ones sent or received often require a more thoughtful and time-consuming response assuming we wish to avoid escalating to an actual conversation.
We have done this to ourselves - by choice and preference. And the irony is that we may eventually revert to those 19th century institutions - the conversation and the mail - because we will have abused every other 'improvement' we can think of. JL
Gideon Lichfield comments in Quartz via Mashable:
Cue, an app for organizing your online personal information, collects data about its users and found that it now takes people around 10% longer, on average, to answer their email than it did just one year ago. This may partly be because people are just getting more email. The Radicati Group, a market research firm, estimated in 2011 that the average corporate email user would be sending and receiving about five extra emails a day each year from 2011 to 2015 — or a 4%-5% annual increase.
But then there's all the extra time people spend on every other form of communication, like text messages, instant message chats, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat — all of which are frankly a lot more fun than email (and quicker, too). Given the increasingly tiny increments of time into which our days our divided, it's amazing we answer email at all.
On current trends, then, if email response times keep increasing by 10% a year, and assuming that an average postal delivery time in your country is two days, by approximately 2020 it will be faster to get an answer from someone by writing a letter than by sending an email.
At that point Google, in order to keep one of the pillars of its advertising business, may find itself obliged to take over the postal systems of the world. Which may be just as well, since nobody else will be able to afford to run them.
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