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Managing Your E-Mail
Book

Managing Your E-Mail

Thinking Outside the Inbox

Christina A. Cavanagh
Wiley, 2003

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

This excellent short guide to the promise and peril of e-mail reveals some surprising and little-noted facts. Far from creating a paperless office, for example, e-mail has multiplied the paper businesses consume. Along with making communication more convenient, immediate and spontaneous, e-mail has raised false expectations and increased the probability of hard feelings and misunderstandings. If those were the only problems this book spotlights, it would be worthwhile to take it seriously. But author Christina A. Cavanagh additionally offers some frightening examples about the invisible cost of e-mail, measured in terms of employee time and legal risk. The book has a tendency to repetitiveness and prolixity, and many of the recommendations for managing e-mail are familiar. However, getAbstract.com particularly recommends her strong examples, which may convince managers to implement the best practices they may already understand but often ignore.

Take-Aways

  • E-mail is both a tremendous blessing and a tremendous curse.
  • E-mail has made business costlier and communication more easily misunderstood.
  • E-mail has compressed the time for delivering and distributing messages and set up false expectations.

About the Author

Christina A. Cavanagh is professor of management communications at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. She is also a consultant on the use of e-mail.

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