The very first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson in late 1971. Ray, a recent MIT grad and a 29 year-old programmer for Bolt, Beranek and Newman, was tinkering with finding a way to send messages person-to-person, between two different computers. He had just started out at BBN, and was supposed to be working on another project entirely when he came up with an email system and address notation in about 5 hours time. (He's the guy responsible for the @ sign in every email address. That's him in the picture.)
Says Ray, "It seemed like a neat idea...there was no directive to go forth and invent email."
Today, 38 years later, more than 220 billion emails are sent daily. (That's 2 million per second) In other words, in the ten seconds that you have spent reading this post so far...about 24 million more emails have been sent. Oops...there goes another 2 million...
For many financial advisors, email has emerged as their #1 communication tool. It is not unusual that an advisor and his/her team would receive, and send, 100+ emails daily (both internal and external). From a coaching vantage point, how advisors address their email inflow/outflow...from a time and interruption management perspective...is a pressing and problematic issue.
No Longer Effective?
Therefore, we were quite interested in this article the other day in the Wall Street Journal entitled, "Why Email No Longer Rules..." Written by the uber-connected journalist, Jessica Vascellaro, the article declares that the reign of email, as the king of communications, is over. She maintains that the new generation of communication services that have taken root, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc., will rewrite the way we communicate "in ways we can only imagine."
For example:
- Expectation of Instantaneous Communication. Some of us old-timers may be creaky enough to remember hand-written notes, as well as the frustration of waiting a few days for a much anticipated letter. Today, we get miffed when a text takes an additional few seconds to get through.
- Communications Less Personal, More Frequent. When 500 or so friends are kept up-to-date on the latest vacation sojourn, how personal is that?
- TMI. With the constant torrent of communication, where we all seem to be firing off (and receiving) messages will-nilly, it is increasingly difficult to discern what's important, and what's not.
Although this piece didn't quite declare the death of email, it does sound some warning bells. The essential point is that our electronic communications habits are much different today. In the past, we communicated in discrete bursts...after booting up our computer, and signing into our email program, we send out our communications in spurts. Today, many of us are continuously-connected; consequently, our communications are pretty much absorbed into the full spectrum of our daily activities. This "always-on" connectivity is a mindset that is embraced by an increasingly larger portion of the population. In fact, over this past year the users of social-networking sites jumped by more than 31% to more than 300 million people.
The $64,000 question is whether the new communication mediums will save time, or drag us deeper into the vortex. The article concludes with a prescient comment, "...we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn't meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful conversation. Such as, say, talking to someone in person."
Amen! The reality for many advisors is that they can become surprisingly isolated...from their clients, peers and colleagues. Despite the advancement of electronic communication, and the enhanced ability to stay "connected"...there remains a subtle wall of separation between the communicating parties. With regard to meaningful dialogue, few things beat live conversations.
by Chris Holman
Search
