Reduce Your Email Usage

Does Spark, or any messaging app reduce your email usage?

We would all like to reduce the amount of emails we get over any day, week or whatever. Email is a fact of life for those both in the technology industry and those outside of it. What if there were a way to significantly reduce your email?

Image taken from letsdovideo.com on David’s opinion piece of Project Squared, now renamed Spark

Cisco’s Rowan Trollope let us in on a little secret when he publicly announced Project Squared. This has greatly reduced his email messages as seen in the chart. This is fantastic! Any way we could reduce the daily clutter that is getting messages from co-workers would be awesome. Oh wait…Spark is part messaging app. It’s obvious to anyone who uses any sort of messaging, when you switch to another format or program for messaging, your older means will go down in usage. Let’s not kid ourselves.

I’ll put it this way; if I decided to start calling everyone who I would normally email, my email usage would go down (and everyone else’s voicemail usage would go up). This is net zero impact as the amount of pure information I need to disseminate hasn’t actually gone down. Spark may or may not be a better way to do it but it’s not reducing the amount of pure information that’s flowing. Time to action may be reduced, but I would wager a guess that anyone who has Spark on their smartphone also has their email account on it as well.

So of course a new way to message, if you adopt it, will in fact reduce your old way of messaging. The question to ask is if the new way will work for you and your team.

Bryan

Follow me on Twitter @bryanhellard