Communication Productivity

Knowledge workers today spend most of their time in the inbox, the inbox by default is the virtual workspace. Productivity is then a direct consequence of the way we use the inbox. If for example the inbox is full of unanswered messages, it will be similar to having leaps of physical files and papers piled up on ones desk.

The issue however here is the inbox does not have only contextual information, it also contains numerous pieces of information which are totally out of context to the worker. There are some bits which in fact will take the worker away from his space and switch him on into another orbit. Then there is no certainty of focus when he or she returns to the virtual workspace (inbox). Productivity thus gets intricately woven into the pattern and behavior of the inbox.

Ever realized how productive we have been when we indulge in social conversations, often the short conversations we have, centered around a topic with all concerned people, are more productive than the endless exchange of emails in to and out of boxes.

The emails have had their time and importance in this entire cycle of communication revolution, and they have had a larger than a fair share of glory. The times that we live in however, are not the times when we celebrate and hold onto a single idea or notion.

We have reached a point in time when the inbox is crying for a major upheaval, it needs to be freed from all the push that enters its being. The limitations have become obvious and there is an urgent need to change.

Web 2.0 does offer solace in its essence and the inbox can finally look to breathe free. Some of the tools like socialtext, colayer, wikipedia etc offer solutions that have the potential to give a lasting freedom to the inbox. colayer for example is a software platform that offers contextualized communication without the use of emails, with highly innovative tools for virtual workspaces. We are all very well familiar with wikipedia as a interactive tool for communication. Socialtext also offers corporate wikis as a possible solution to day to day communication and there are many more solutions that measure up to this issue.

The application of web 2.0 technology in the office communication space seems like a challenge, but then this was exactly how the pre-email phase was. Integrating emails into office communication had its ups and downs before it reached the stage that we are in today.

Knowledge workers will soon have tools that allows official communication in a social setting, productivity will no longer be hampered by the inflow of non-contextual information. Conversations will take place in context and the time spent on making a sense of it all will be negligible. The push will be replace by the pull and workers will have the tools to only take in what is most relevant.

We are at the threshold of a new and emerging form of communication and few years from now we will look back at this time as the time of preparation.