My 30 day challenges, day 11 – by Philip Dodson

So over a third of the way through my 30 day challenges and already I am doing more, losing weight, getting healthier, apart from a cold this week!!!

Today’s thoughts are about email and whether or not it will exist in 5 years time? Will I be pressing the ‘delete account’ button?

Email has been a revolution in the transferring and sharing of information/data and has enabled people to be connected in ways that were previously impossible to do. Email has lead to many advances in technology, in fact it is probably one of the main drivers for phones evolving in to smart phones.

However, like most successes, they often have a shelf-life and become victims of their own success. Email enhanced productivity and made our working lives easier. Then it started to become an easy way of pushing things of our to-do list on to someone else’s. Then it got used to externally market your business and the age email marketing started. In my opinion, email is now more of a burden than a benefit.

Now we are bombarded endlessly on a daily basis with email form colleagues, customers, friends, people selling us stuff, in fact the list could go on. We’ve now setup filters, blocks, rules, and so on to stop email, the very thing 15-20 years ago we so desperately craved.

With the arrival of social media, I now see for the first time a world without email. I now find that I am sending less and less email. I’m deleting more and more without reading it. When I do use email, I find that it is slow, as you write your message in a more formal, long winded way, simply as it is an email versus a tweet.

Social media enables you to communicate more succinctly and instantly than email, it’s easier to block stuff you don’t want, as you choose who to receive from. You create your own network and people choose you.

You can easily share documents with others through Dropbox or Google, so the need for sending attachments via email is no longer there.

So like most things in life, things move on, I for one believe email will disappear and I am not sure I will shed a tear about the demise of it.