Business Insight Zone

Lean-operations specialist Dan Markovitz offers some thoughts on Sue Shellenbarger’s recent WSJ column about using less e-mail:

One simple way to get more productive.

… As a matter of principle, lean eschews … technology for technology’s sake. Lean organizations don’t want to automate broken processes; they want to fix the process before investing in technology. And it’s even better if they can get by without investing in fancy technology solutions. …

Amen, Dan. I can’t tell you how many times I personally have tried to turn to a technology fix for something that had much more to do with my own kludgy internal “operating system” than with any particular technology glitch.

Low-e-mail projects like the ones Shellenbarger describes seem like good ways to interrupt the counterproductive habits of today’s cubicle-dwellers. They encourage alternative approaches that aren’t about handling e-mail better (e.g. by filters), but about handling work better. And that’s something that just about all of us could benefit from.