Creative Idea Powerhouse

Enough for email as new social environment. Inbox 2.0 should not focus on getting more stuffs into your inbox, but rather to focus how to make you do less in your email and start to get productivity up. Last month, GigaOm posted an article about Email as the new social environment, which OM talks that Yahoo and Google finally realize that their biggest assets, 260million email users from Yahoo! and 100million from Gmail, can be converted into social environment. Yeah I agreed from business standpoint there is huge amount of benefits and profit dollars in making email as a social platform for you to get your friend’s RSS update, twitter message, facebook updates, which make your email client become more sticky to you. By then, not only ads, spam are all squezing into your inbox, your facebook feeds, RSS, social sites updates all are going to bomboarding your inbox too. Currently average users get around 160 emails a day from all your multiple mailboxes. Imagine if your facebook, myspace, flickr, and other many more updates are going to come in to your inbox, what is this going to happen to you in person?
We are currently under email overwork, email overload, email overspam and email overstress stage. Imagine you are half-way rushing your weekly report and inside your mailbox there’s someone just drop in and say hi on your facebook, it pop up small notifier, which lead you to get distract. Go and look back at your facebook once again, I have 400 friends on my list, and if I were to continue getting updates from my social network, what will happen next?
It is time to call for a ‘stop’ and ‘think’ stage before we further innovate the email system already. Yes I agreed young generation wants to stay connected as much as they can, and I like Gabor’s argument on this ‘the fact is that when they go in to corporate world, does the company want their employees to stay connected always?’. Email will not die, and will continue to stay as a form of communication for corporate world in next decades. So how to better help the user to ‘Manage’ their works by helping them to manage their ‘email workload’ will be a big interest for corporate market in next few years to come. After all, $300billion losses per year on email overmanage is a big figure for corporate world according to research from Radicati.
While waiting for some cutting edge tools to better manage your inbox, here is some self-help tips that you can work by yourself before the email flooding your inbox.