You’ve Got Mail

With such tremendous improvements in technology, we should be completing our work faster. Shouldn’t we? But how many of us do? Why is it that people these days tend ‘to work’ longer hours, finishing exactly the same amount of work? Or should I be saying why is it that people these days tend ‘to stay in office’ for longer hours, finishing the same amount of work?

So what is it that people do in office? How do companies manage to keep their people busy?

By getting them to check their mails of course.

Everybody sends out mails to everybody else. The xyz department has to prove that its doing its bit, so it sends out a bunch of emails to everyone, the abc division of course does not want to be left behind, nor do the various other departments that exist in organizations. The managers of course have to keep their team motivated and focused, what better way could there be to communicate to them than to send frequent mails.

Thanks to mailing groups, you don’t even have to type in all the mail addresses, just type away and enter the group mailing id and you have just sent a mail to a thousand people.

So the top management keeps itself busy sending emails to everyone. The various departments compete with each other sending mails to everyone else proving how active they are in the organization and what a wonderful job they are doing. The managers motivate their respective teams by sending out mails to them and inform the rest of the world how well their teams are doing by sending out mails again.

The remaining people have just about enough time to read all their mails and realize how much work everyone else seems to be doing.

So who does all the work?

My guess is it gets done after office hours, when you are not expected to be in office. Which of course also implies that you are not expected to send any mails.

We are so used to being ‘connected’ all the time, through either email or chat clients or cell phones or landlines, that we are always expecting to be contacted by someone all the time. This has become such a constant distraction that it has had a huge impact on our productivity levels.

I bet you read at least 15 mails before you completed reading this. Gotcha!! Didn’t I? Anyways, its about time I check my inbox….