Why Email is Broken

There is more information available today than we can possibly process, and many business leaders and experts talk about "information overload" as one of the biggest impediments to productivity. In our personal lives an endless stream of news, weather, entertainment and social information comes at us from everywhere. At work the unstoppable flow of information comes in the form of overflowing inboxes stuffed with messages and documents demanding varying degrees of our attention.

Currently much of this information flows via email. This leads to a number of problems, including the difficulty of "occupational spam" where people are copied on email messages they don't need to read. The burden is on the sender to identify who needs the information. This often leads to critical people being left out of the loop.

On the other side of the equation, over-eager spam filters (including a human who is overwhelmed and clicks the delete button too quickly) are a big problem, as is the problem of simply missing a message in the hundreds that people receive each day.

Workers are constantly walking the line of whittling down the massive amounts of information they get to a manageable level without missing or deleting the relevant information they need. One way to increase productivity significantly is to use RSS as a more efficient alternative to email for day-to-day news distribution, project coordination, scheduling and document requests and distribution. It is much easier and quicker to read an RSS feed from 50 projects than to wade through an overstuffed inbox, sending requests for information, spending time searching and visiting multiple websites to see if anything new has happened.