Instant communication is a fact of business life these days: emails, Twitters, texts and more pour in through our computers, phones and Blackberries as quickly as we can process them. It’s enabled unprecedented productivity and global teamwork in our time, but there is a growing backlash against this breakneck pace — and the imperative of email.

The “quest for the empty inbox,” some experts say, is hijacking our productivity and hampering our ability to concentrate on longer-term strategic goals.

The confusion starts at the very top. In a recent Variety article, “Execs are Inundated and Twitterpated,” Editorial Director Peter Bart shares,

I was with a group of top executives who admitted they had no idea how to cope with the chaos of email. One CEO said he simply ignored his email. Another said he assigned an assistant to sort through it, and then ignored it. A third said he had taken to sending petulant emails to associates who sent unnecessary email.

If our leaders can’t handle their own communications, how can anyone hope to?

Email demands an unsustainable amount of effort from everyone involved. What is being sacrificed is our ability to actually do our work. “Communication may be the bedrock of business systems today, but it has also become an albatross around our necks and is draining us of our productivity,” says Brent McConnell in “The Mythical 40 Hour Workweek.” “As organizations have flattened over the last two decades and command-and-control hierarchies have been replaced with matrix-style organizations, communication between an ever increasing number of interested parties has sapped nearly all productivity from today’s corporations.”

McConnell is expanding upon the ideas of the book The Mythical Man Month, which famously demonstrated that adding resources to a project did not necessarily speed up the project, because the need for all parties involved to communicate added tremendous overhead.

The problem goes beyond mere deadlines, and into the much more serious territory of goals:

Not only has excessive email communication become the norm in business, it’s also how we are defining success in our workdays.  In times gone by we defined our success by how we contributed towards the company’s objectives and whether or not we influenced the bottom line.  Today we define success by whether or not we’ve processed all our incoming email and at least looked like we handled all the day’s “hot” issues. How many times have you gotten nothing productive done during the day, but felt successful just because your INBOX was empty?  We’ve become a slave to our communications systems and reacting to them rather than intelligently planning and using email and IM as tools for thoughtful articulation of messages.

There’s a new book out this fall that deals with the pace of email and one’s quality of life: The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox by John Freeman. I’ve read his much talked about manifesto on “slow communication” that was published in The New York Times, and listened to a National Public Radio interview with Freeman just yesterday. “The computer and e-mail were sold to us as tools of liberation,” writes Freeman, “but they have actually inhibited our ability to conduct our lives mindfully, with the deliberation and consideration that are the hallmark of true agency.”

The author decries the “frantic” pace of modern communication and questions if it is really working for us. He advocates a work-life balance that will probably sound alarming to anyone really dependent on their email. Set your email to check a pre-determined number of times per day, and don’t check it extraneously, he advised on the radio. Switch over to the telephone if an email exchange turns into a staccato back-and-forth negotiation of one-liners. Set your colleagues’ expectations that you do not respond instantly. Focus on your real goals.

All good thoughts, but many employees deal with extreme pressure from peers and managers to be constantly available; refusing to participate in the email frenzy signals laziness or insubordination. One of the NPR callers stated that her employer actually required employees to send emails, to prevent them from “unproductively” visiting one another at their desks. This really seems short-sighted to me, as there is a lot of communication best done face-to-face. Yet, I sympathize with a company’s desire to offer some kind of guidelines as to how its employees communicate.

And so I look to our readers.

• Has anyone been asked to author a policy concerning responsiveness to email?
• Have you been instructed (or instructed your staff) as to when to use IM versus email versus the telephone?
• Does anyone work in an environment where a return to “slower” communication (such as checking email six times a day) might be acceptable?

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