Did You Hear What They Said About Email? OMG!

Like you, I get a ton of email.  Some are serious emails about stuff going on inside our company.  Some, not so much...

In fact, a HUGE chunk of the email we all get each day is less about the bottom line, and more about people's bottoms.  Or other fodder for gossip.

"15% of office e-mail is gossip. While we read our e-mail inbox, plowing through the latest budget spreadsheet, the calendar request for a meeting and a request from the boss for an ASAP review of a high-priority document, what we're really focused on is each other. The average corporate e-mail user sends 112 e-mails every day. Of those, about one out of seven is gossip, according to a study by researchers at Georgia Tech. Led by Eric Gilbert, an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing, the team examined hundreds of thousands of e-mails from the former Enron corporation and found that -- by the definition of "gossip" as messages that contain information about a person or persons not among the recipients -- 14.7% of the e-mails qualify as office scuttlebutt. What's more, the gossip is prevalent at all levels of the corporate hierarchy, though lower-level employees gossip the most."

You can read more about it here, and gossip about it later.