In the past decade, email has become one of the most central applications of any manager. Still, email programs have not changed much. Since the amount of email we get has grown tremendously, email has a significant impact on our overall productivity. The average information worker gets far more mail than s/he can cope with, and an increasing number of people suffer from significant “email overload”.

Are you are one of those people who receive hundreds of emails a day, and have you sometimes thought to simply “delete all email of your mailbox”? Now that financial bankruptcies have been become part of our day to day readings, I would like to draw your attention to “email bankruptcy”, which essentially means that you delete all your pending email and start over. The term was invented already years ago (although we still don’t know if we should attribute the invention of the term to Stanford’s professor Lawrence Lessig or to MIT professor Sherry Turkle). This “start over” approach may be a very radical solution to a common problem, but more people than we might think have been trying to get out of the email overload spiral (have a look at, “leave me alone” or this Wired article for some popular examples).

And nowadays, we are even spreading our attention more and more: we need to pay attention to our Facebook, read the different blogs for which we have alerts on, we twitter, myspace, … and, above all, our email follows us conveniently wherever we, since we have now have push-mail!

It’s hence not surprising that more and more people declare their collapse vis-à-vis their email. But before taking the last and really radical step of declaring yourself in email bankruptcy –with the implications of having email creditors and all those other nasty side-effects of loss of reputation- let’s go a moment back to the basic and rethink our email practice.

To start with, remember that email initially was conceived to overcome one of the big problems of the phone: it queues messages, and hence does not require your immediate action. Unlike synchrounous communications like phone calls or meetings, people can communicate via email without both paying attention at the same time. This means that YOU pick the moments at which you pay attention to email. But if you are paying continuous attention to your email, this means that anyone can interrupt anytime what you are doing. Hence, somebody else picks the moments at which you pay attention (even any spam emailer gets your mindshare, at least for a second).

Does this sound familiar to you? If yes, it’s probably time to think a little bit more about our productivity (and a healthy state of mind!), and less about continuous emailing, microblogging, or microsharing. In the last years, some practices have shown how to increase productivity by changing little bis of our email behaviour. You may think that these are too radical to you, but if you are close to email bankruptcy, you may try them before becoming really radical. And who knows, most people that try them out report back that while no disaster happens, there life has improved. Although I’m still trying to formalize on this topic (I will inform you about my results in some weeks) let’s start naming a few that seem to work quite well:

1. Turn-off your email program and check it only from time to time. It should be you who controls when you want to be interrupted. And remember, our productivity goes down badly with increased numbers of interruptions. Set aside some few dedicated times for dealing with email every day. If you think that this is not possible, think that even Bill Gates checks his email in general only twice a day… or at least that’s what people say…

2. Some things should not be in our email: don’t criticize, and avoid long (often technical) debates. Use face to face meetings or phone calls that are of an intrinsically interactive nature. Even if it may be tedious to set up a common time to talk, we will get things done much faster if we do this effort for issues that require joint work. Tricky or personal issues require personal contact, so we should not put those things on our email.

3. Filter! Most email clients have some filters that allow us to automatically redirect or store emails with certain characteristics. In this way, we can separate emails with important information and actions to be taken from those repetitive alerts that only add to our email pile. Even if it takes some time to set up convenient filters, the initial effort quickly shows its effects in terms of (apparently) much less email traffic!

4. Work on the easy ones. If you can retire an email with a quick response, do it now. And then, go back to work!

5. Schedule some time for the difficult ones. If an email requires a significant amount of work (more than 15 minutes), this should be reflected in your calendar and to do’s list.

Obviously, these are only some of the many things that one can do to get in control of its email, but you may want to give a try to one or two of these. Actually, it’s inaccurate to talk about email management without mentioning task and calendar management. More about this will come in future post!

The Long Tail effect seems to be making its way into yet another business domain. This time it is the domain of sourcing, or more specifically sourcing of business services. According to the classical rules of Long Tail, the spread of the Internet and the evolution of web technologies have led to drastic reductions in search and transaction costs, which in turn enabled a large number of small local players, both on the supply and demand sides, to join the global market. These firms carry out a large number of small-value transactions, which together make up a respectable size market. If the trend continues in the future, it is likely to change the way firms create and manage their outsourcing portfolios. It will also further propel the much-touted e-lance economy.

Various terms have been used to describe the phenomenon, including Online Freelance Marketplaces, Online Programming Marketplaces, Person-to-Person Offshoring, Electronic Market for Services etc. We prefer the broad umbrella term Online Sourcing Marketplaces (OSMs) that captures most of the individual flavours. OSM is an Internet environment where buyers and suppliers of business services can meet, offer and bid for jobs, settle contracts, and carry out financial transactions. A number of online platforms currently provide such environments. Some of the bigger players include GetAFreelancer, Elance.com, GetACoder, RentACoder, Guru.com, and AgaveBlue. While most of these firms are based in the US (with a few exceptions), the audience they serve is truly global with both suppliers and buyers coming from different countries around the world.

So how do OSMs work? The majority employs the reverse auction model. In a nutshell, the buyer posts a project and receives bids from potential suppliers. The buyer then selects a supplier and awards the project based on the bid amount as well as other criteria, such as delivery time, suppliers’ reputational ratings etc. The parties manage the project by communicating via a private message board and other online means provided by the OSM platform. Once the work is completed, the buyer has to approve it and pay the supplier. At this point, the buyer also leaves feedback and rates the supplier on how well the project has been executed. Hearsay evidence suggests that in order to mitigate quality control risks, buyers often award the same contract to multiple suppliers. Although this implies paying multiple times for the same project, in the end the buyer can choose from several alternatives and pick the best one for the final rollout.

The range of services currently traded on OSMs is quite broad. The top three categories include IT-related jobs, design and multimedia, and writing and translation. Significant activity has been also recorded in other areas such as administrative support, legal services, and sales and marketing. Keeping true with the Long Tail principle, the average OSM deal amount remains low and hovers between US $100 and $5000. The majority of projects on Guru.com, for example, sells for US $700 or less. While it is difficult to come up with a reliable estimate for the overall market size, Evalueserve, a research and analytics services firm, suggests that in 2007 OSMs earned more than US $250 million in revenue (this comes mostly from registration and project commission fees). This estimate is consistent with the figures reported by individual OSM providers. Elance.com, for example, expects its total billing in 2008 to rise 50% and reach US $60 million, while Guru.com forecasts revenues of US $26 million in 2008. Most firms also report a double to triple digit growth in the number of subscribers and projects.

While the OSM phenomenon has been around for a number of years, it remains new and poorly understood by most firms. This summer we started a research project here at IESE looking at how and why firms engage in offering and providing services via OSMs. Our goal is to take a comprehensive view and try to understand the key benefits, challenges, and success factors for all the stakeholders involved. To accomplish this we will need to get input from a wide range of firms and individuals, including OSM platforms providers, buyers, and supplies. If you have been involved in any of these capacities in an OSM project, we encourage you to participate in the study. To do so, please leave your feedback on this blog or send us an email.