The ability to communicate is one of the fundamental things that sets humans apart from other species. So it’s ironic that most couples’ counseling ends up in a discussion of “we just need to communicate better” and most postmortems on professional issues end up with “well, it was a communication problem”. 

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.  -George Bernard Shaw

In traditional corporate structures communication was very much a top-down process: executives wrote memos and expected underlings to read them. Today, with email and a trend toward more horizontal org structures, communication is much more likely to be 360-degrees.

But when 16 people are cc’d on every email – that just makes people go numb and want to kill themselves.

So we’ve gone from an era when many projects fail from undercommunication to a time when projects can fail because the team members are suffering from information overload.

Personally, I spend half my day just trying to keep up with my email inbox (Last week I also got several complaints that my voicemail was full. Sorry about that.)

We're on a campaign at Tivix right now to reduce email volume. Our general internal rules are:

• Never use email to schedule a meeting (that's what calendar invites are for).
• Never use email for assigning engineering tasks (that's what PivotalTracker is for).
• Never use email for sharing project documents (that's what Basecamp is for).
• Never use email for internal discussion (that's what HipChat is for).

Those four things decrease our internal email volume dramatically, making our team much more effective at doing what matters: actually getting shit done.