Meaningful Communication
Take a look at the hundreds of emails you received today: how many of them are helpful? Have you ever been to a meeting without an agenda or in which 80% of the discussion wasn’t relevant to you? Emails and disturbances make people less productive than if they were smoking pot [1]. At any opportunity you have, take yourself and others out of this.
In concrete actions
- Keep the number of stakeholders against each project to the minimum. Print the list of stakeholders out and pass it onto everybody on a project.
- Face-to-face communication is more fruitful when communication is complex or one-off and needs to be actioned immediately.
- Don’t write an email unless you are passing on new information.
- Avoid To/CC’ing people into your emails unless the conversation you are creating is specifically related to them. There is only a certain amount they can read a day and too much disruption gives less time for real responsibilities.
- Avoid using large email groups as they create far too much noise and produce only a small amount of benefit. Instead you should have smaller more organic email groups for specific projects.
- Living information should be created by your processes: development, reporting bugs, meetings, and conversations. Ensure that writing code and sitting in meetings produces concrete information.
- Information should be accessible. It should not only be stored in emails since these are ephemeral and get lost in time.
[1] http://articles.cnn.com/2005-04-22/world/text.iq_1_mails-iq-messages
