Many of us have worked in a company where the pace was sky-high and email was the primary means of communication. In any given workday, I might get more than 200 pieces of relevant email, at least half of which I was supposed to read and respond to. I get probably one tenth of the email today as I got ten years ago; at one point I worked out that I've personally written more than 10,000 emails.

But times have changed and people are much less enthusiastic about email. In fact, computer chip manufacturer Intel is looking into reducing email usage. Sometimes, I dread opening my mailbox because I'm worried about having to plough through a mountain of email. Then, of course, I feel guilty about not responding to these messages.

Instant response

I think that email is different from what it used to be. It's just generally more stressful and email has been caught between two opposing forces - instantaneous communications like Twitter, text, instant messaging and phones, on the one hand, and slower, broadcast communications like blogs and the internet, on the other.

Text, instant messaging and phones need rapid responses to be effective. If you try to chat with someone and they're not there, the chances are you will just give up - at least for now. You may not email them, you probably won't just type away in a text window as if it were email: you just catch them later. What you wanted was a conversation, not an audience.

Email, however, wants an audience, and with that comes obligations and expectations. If someone emails you, you think that they are generally expecting something in return, and with that sense of obligation there's a sense, sometimes, of dread.

I'm not espousing the death of email. It remains an immensely valuable tool that has been marred by unrealistic expectations and indiscriminate usage. In some cases, email has become the thing we do rather than a tool we use to do the other things we do. We need to find a way to make email work for us, rather than against us (see box).

Technology companies need to provide businesses with tools that allow employees to make email as useful as possible. Users need to find the information they need both in email and beyond, and they need email to map to the social networks and relevance they have in other forms of communication. Email needs to work for the people and information management that harnesses user's social behaviour is the way to make this happen.

How to make email work for you

• Relevance
Email should only appear in your inbox if it is directly relevant to you. Relevance shouldn’t just be based on the name appearing on the to: or cc: line.

• Archiving and search
Email is generally not searchable, so try to get it redirected into a blog, publish it via RSS, thus making it searchable.

• Lag
Don’t demand instantaneous responses in email and don’t give them. Technology could help here by adding lag into the system.

• Reputation
If someone is a particularly good email author, they should be rewarded with priority to inboxes, better publishing and more timely results. If someone is annoying in email, perhaps they should be relegated to a searchable folder elsewhere. This could be managed via a reputation system, and the best kind would be one where it’s automatic. If I forward an email to a friend with the subject line ‘the best advice I’ve seen on compliance’ it would be useful if the email system rewarded me by increasing my reputation.

• Collaboration
In many organisations, information and knowledge are transferred through email, but this is only accessible to the senders and recipients. As a result, masses of important information are just not made available to other people in the organisation who might benefit greatly from it. We need to address these problems through technologies which map that email flow, understand people’s interests and collaborations and use this information to help their employees to work more effectively.

Peter Biddle is vice president at Trampoline Systems

www.trampolinesystems.com