I worked a good part of the weekend going through my nearly 500 emails 
that I was behind reading. By midnight Sunday, my inbox was empty. “Whoo Hoo,” I thought, I’m caught up and ready for a busy week with tech plans to write and issues to solve….
After a single day’s worth of meetings, I have 115 unread emails. Either I work all night on these or face getting behind again. But, even then, I don’t have the extra time for real work.
I think we have to do something with school and district communication. Having an “intranet’ does not cut it, just as a “data warehouse” does not solve data issues. A communications initiative to solve communications inefficiencies is the answer. Briefly the goal would be for some information posted to the intranet, some on internal social media (Google+, Yammer, Chatter, etc), some on the internet, some posted to drives, some tweeted, some said at a meeting, and a little in email. There are many alternatives to email to explore. Some progressive organizations have cut email such that emails are sent mainly for CYA communications as in “Per our conversation, blah, blah, blah…” I’m not the only one who thinks email stinks.
Schools and districts need to free up personnel to do real work and not be email processors. I propose broadening internal communications and exploring how to get folks to put communication on the right medium for a particular purpose. Likewise we need educate users to deal with the email that we do have and set expectations on email district-wide so we are not in email hell.
Let me know what you think…
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