EMail Limitations

We all live and swear by our email these days. We are attached to emails so much that we get fidgety if not on the grid even for a few hours. Yes, email is great and a great way to communicate across the world almost instantaneously at little or no cost. With unlimited storage and always on connectivity, it is easy to see why email is the most used technology internet functionality and kind of infectious.

But does it always aide in improved productivity? This interesting article thinks otherwise and makes a case for good old face to face meetings / teams in some cases.

“When you communicate with a group you only know through electronic channels, it’s like having functional Asperger’s Syndrome — you are very logical and rational, but emotionally brittle,” Professor Shirky said.

“I’m part of a far-flung distributed network that at one point was designing a piece of software for sharing medical data; we worked mostly by conference calls and e-mail, and it was going nowhere. So we finally said we’d all fly to Boston and get together for two days, just sit in a room and hash it out.”

What's your take? How does email help you and where does it fail you?