Email has become so embedded in our working lives it’s hard to imagine business functioning without it. But rather than managing our inbox, we often let it mange us, which is where Web 2.0 could help ease the information overload.

There’s no doubt email has become an integral part of conducting business but its use is now so widespread, many users are suffering from information overload and wasting hours in their inbox. Could Web 2.0 help us regain control?

It all boils down to our email psychology, according to independent software consultant Suw Charman-Anderson, who gave her views on how to solve the email problem at the Web 2.0: Practical Applications for Business Benefit conference, held in London last month.

She quoted research figures that suggest 38% of people currently receive more than 100 emails a day and 22% spend more than four hours in their inbox. Other figures revealed that while 35% of people claimed to check their email every 15 minutes, when observed, it was actually every five.

Does it really matter though? Surely the point is we’re still choosing when to dip into the inbox. Not necessarily so, says Charman-Anderson. To start with, most people have instant alerts to let them know as soon as an email arrives. People then take an average of 1.44 minutes to respond and 70% of people respond within six seconds of getting the alert.

Furthermore, just as phone calls can interrupt our train of thought, it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover from dealing with email and resuming work. Add up the averages and it amounts to spending eight hours a week just trying to recall what we were doing in the first place.

What are the odds?

Charman-Anderson believes half the battle is changing the way we use email as a tool and the culture that underlies it. She likens it to a gambling addition – more specifically ‘operant conditioning’. Basically, if you get a reward for doing something, you’re likely to do it again and again. So in this case, while most emails might be boring, you get the odd nice ones in between, which keeps us obsessed enough to keep checking back.

So how do we regain control? IBM’s Luis Suarez, who also gave a talk on thinking out of the inbox and the changing nature of collaboration at the conference, has given up on corporate emails. You can view his story here at a recent Web 2.0 expo. He claims email “made everyone but me productive”. Critics gave him just two weeks to last out in such a big technology firm but he has been clean for nearly a year by using social software, claiming to have reduced his inbox from receiving 30-40 emails per day to 20-30 a week, which are mainly events to add to the business calendar.

His argument is that email is locked, private and has no visibility. He also believes there is a tendency to play “political games” with the CC and BCC function. In contrast, social networks are more open, public and transparent. You are also interacting with your own communities, something that Suarez says has made him more productive because he is more in control of how he works and has a stronger sense of contribution.

Additionally, he believes he has made stronger and more mutually trustworthy relationships with colleagues and customers on open platforms, with communities more willing to help each other. For example, if you went on holiday for three weeks, you might come back to find 300 emails waiting to be dealt with in your inbox. Suarez says a quick check on a site such as Twitter.com means community members can instantly give you a short update on any key things you have missed.

Does everyone need to know?

However, if you’re not ready for email cold turkey just yet, there are other alternatives that can help rethink our email relationships. Some companies have tried the less extreme option of banning employees from using emails for just one day a week. Unfortunately, this tends to result in people desperately trying to do all their emailing on either side of that day. It doesn’t deal with the underlying cause so it’s not that effective.

Instead, Charman-Anderson recommends removing the stimulus to check our emails, which means ditching the instant alert. This could be replaced, for example, with a timetable of when to check. The most common times people delve into the inbox, she says, are when we first arrive at work, just before and after lunch and last thing before going home. This means you can work out when the important emails are likely to come in and be more responsive.

Another way forward is to positively reinforce behaviours such as using social tools for tasks not always best suited to email. Charman-Anderson pointed out that while in manufacturing you can judge a person’s productivity by the amount of goods they produce, in the knowledge economy it’s not so easy. Sending lots of emails has become a proxy for work, along with time spent in meetings, business travel and time spent at your desk.

“Because these have become proxies for work, they have become a point of pride,” she said. “There is a martyrdom complex – the more email you get, the more important and productive you are. This is a social reward.”

She also claims it is driven by job insecurity. You don’t want to be the person in the firing line if something goes wrong because someone hasn’t seen your email, so emails become an audit trail. And if everyone else finds it acceptable to bombard others in the company with useless emails, you don’t want to feel the odd one out.

But how many times have you been included in an endless and sometimes pointless ‘reply all’? If you need to have a discussion about a document that is likely to illicit lots of questions, changes or comments, for example, why not post it on a wiki so the relevant people can access it and collaborate?

With broadcast emails – e.g, if you want to know about a change to a company policy or need to find the expenses form – rather than spending ages hunting around for the last email in your inbox, why not move this information to a company blog where it is easier to find? Other notifications you may have signed up for might be better served on an RSS feed.

It’s good to walk

There are also occasions when you might need a quick reply to something. The temptation is to put it in an email that ends up being sent back and forth a few times when you could have the conversation on instant messenger, pick up the phone, or even just walk over to a person’s desk.

And here lies another problem, says Charman-Anderson: not many people state their expectations in an email, i.e. whether the email is for your information only or for the whole company; if you need a response by the end of the day or whether it can wait until the end of the week. This can cause unnecessary extra workloads and makes it hard to break the instant response habit.

"Email is fundamental to business – if you took away email tomorrow the economy would collapse," Charman-Anderson conceded. "It’s our key way of exchanging information and communicating, but we know very little about email and we assume far too much."

Change is never easy and it will take a significant mental and as well as physical shift to move away from email dependence. But if you look at how social networking tools are already shaping our social and business lives, they could be the next logical step to regaining control of email.

An overview of the Web 2.0 conference can be found in this month's blog spot, while Peter Bond has produced a guide to Improved collective performance: Investing in Web 2.0.