I have a supervisor who clogs my inbox with dozens of messages. He sends out e-mails for every thought that has ever crossed his mind to the point that his Internet traffic could qualify him as a spam-bot. I am left to sort through them and determine the necessity of the messages and then turn to him and answer as he sits less than five meters beyond my desk. As an aside, it is interesting how the use of capital letters and exclamation points is inversely proportional to the actual importance of the message.
It is not uncommon to receive a request to complete a task that was previously completed and provided to him. It is also not uncommon to receive a directive to do something that is entirely contradictory to what the team agreed to do which then causes our director to chastise all of the team members since he also is copied on the contradictory emails and thinks that we are idiots.
I have spent many a morning steaming over my inbox and have come to one conclusion: Google needs to develop a Gmail Goggles application for businesses.
Currently Goggles is a Labs feature that was developed to stop the e-mail version of drunk dialing. It can be set up so that if you send an e-mail at a certain time of night (i.e. between midnight and 4am) you will be asked to confirm if you really want to send it. It also has a feature that requests for you to solve a few, simple math equations before your email can be sent to verify your state of mind.
I think that a Goggles Office Edition would be highly beneficial in terms of time saved and blood pressure reduced. It would be worth its weight in gold for me not to have to spend one more minute biting my tongue as our director tries to puzzle out why the team can't seem to recall anything that we agreed upon, in some cases less than five minutes after a meeting. A simple reminder of "Was this issue resolved in the meeting while you were playing on your iphone?" or "Are you sure this isn't redundant?" may reduce my inbox load and my blood pressure significantly.
It is not uncommon to receive a request to complete a task that was previously completed and provided to him. It is also not uncommon to receive a directive to do something that is entirely contradictory to what the team agreed to do which then causes our director to chastise all of the team members since he also is copied on the contradictory emails and thinks that we are idiots.
I have spent many a morning steaming over my inbox and have come to one conclusion: Google needs to develop a Gmail Goggles application for businesses.
Currently Goggles is a Labs feature that was developed to stop the e-mail version of drunk dialing. It can be set up so that if you send an e-mail at a certain time of night (i.e. between midnight and 4am) you will be asked to confirm if you really want to send it. It also has a feature that requests for you to solve a few, simple math equations before your email can be sent to verify your state of mind.
I think that a Goggles Office Edition would be highly beneficial in terms of time saved and blood pressure reduced. It would be worth its weight in gold for me not to have to spend one more minute biting my tongue as our director tries to puzzle out why the team can't seem to recall anything that we agreed upon, in some cases less than five minutes after a meeting. A simple reminder of "Was this issue resolved in the meeting while you were playing on your iphone?" or "Are you sure this isn't redundant?" may reduce my inbox load and my blood pressure significantly.
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