Since I had two computers crash on me yesterday and can safely be described as angry at anything with a motherboard, I’d like to apply some value-stream mapping to a couple of technologies that have swept us up in their cloying tentacles. 

The easiest place to start is email ─ the amount of non-value added time we dedicate to this communication medium is mind-boggling. It’s probably fair to say that most of us receive somewhere in the neighborhood of 200-300 emails each day. In my case, approximately 150 of those are correspondence that I never would have had to deal with pre-email ─ messages selling me knockoff handbags and pharmaceuticals, begging me to lose weight, or, in the latest tack, calling me a moron. (Spammers have targeted nearly every human impulse in their efforts at temptation: insecurity, greed, thrift, lust, machismo, etc.)

Even with spam filters, which have evolved to a respectable level of accuracy, we’re so paranoid about losing a desired message that we herd all the would-be spam into an email purgatory that we must wade through daily. As such, we haven’t calmed the storm; we’ve just moved it to a secured location, like Dick Cheney on Sundays. I still have to open the bunker and look through a bouillabaisse of asinine subject lines, then decide to trash them all. As if I would have been duped into opening the email that screams, “Yeah Boyeee!” (actual message from this morning) had it not been safely quarantined and labeled “possible spam.”

So what’s the answer? Here’s mine: No email gets through unless the sender is in your email address book. Any senders turned away receive a bounce-back email stating that they were rejected, and including your phone number. Spammers won’t call (make sure you’re on the Do Not Call list), but real business contacts will.

Next on the hit list is mobile messaging, which involves the often clumsy ─ and always hilarious ─ act of pressing our oversized primate thumbs against keys that are the size of Nerds candy and squished together like tourists on the subway. This means I get messages such as: woll revsew and get bck to yu.

It’s time for voice recognition software to solve this problem ─ and here I’m only talking about a solution for the business set; the kids can text till their thumbs turn blue and it’s only going to help the economy. The logic is that we’re all very comfortable having blaring conversations into our cell phones or BlackBerries, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to simply speak into that same device to dictate and send email messages. It would be a return to the early days of mass media ─ our editor in chief Dave Brousell recently recalled the experience during his early career of calling into the newsroom to dictate a story to a copy writer ─ in this case the copy writer would be a computer application.

Voice recognition software works pretty well. It has come a long way, and I think it’s time we all stopped plugging away with our thumbs and wasting our precious time on primitive technology. If a monkey could compose a message on a BlackBerry and trick me into thinking it was from my boss, we need to find a better way.

Let’s stop wasting our time ─ the Fourth of July is coming, the lawn is begging to be mowed, and we need to sit out and enjoy some fireworks. Put down the PDA, junk all that spam, and let’s find some value in time well spent.

Posted by Chris Chiappinelli at 07/02/2008 01:16:21 PM |