Ross Mayfield from SocialText recently blogged about how broken business practices are the cause of email overload. Ross says:
"Most people don't dispute that they suffer from email overload. A recent report from Basex in the NYTimes revealed that people spend 28% of their day interrupted by things like unnecessary email. However, what we do about our overload is a source of much debate."

Ross's solution, one might guess, are the tools he's created at SocialText. There are some interesting implementations there to consider. But there are other ways to handle it. Here are a few I've collected for you to review from around the web:

• You Are Not Your Inbox - This is a course offered by Stever Robbins, from the Get it Done Guy podcast. I got the CDs, listened, and found the advice useful (and funny).
• Inbox Zero - Productivity superstar Merlin Mann helps with a process he calls Inbox Zero, which dovetails nicely with David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology, if you're already following that.
• Giving Up on Work Email - Luis Suarez, superstar of social media at IBM, has quite a radical project underway. I linked to Week 25, which has an interesting video to go with it. Worth checking out, and matches some of Ross's ideas.
• AwayFind - I'm trying out Jared Goralnick's suggested solution: an email management form, to at least encourage people to think before deciding an email is urgent.

What do you think? Could your organization find other ways to discuss internal status messages without using email? Do you have enterprise collaboration tools in place that cut back on this? How do you think the methods mentioned above might change the way you do business at YOUR office? Or would your office even try any alternatives? Drop me an email (oh, the irony!): [email protected] to discuss further.

By the way, this is related to some of what we'll talk about at the Fall ITEC events. Are you going?