On Restrooms and Eye Glasses: An E-Mail Parable

A while back, I flew home from a conference and sat next to the chief operating officer of an 800-person company. (Call him Steve here). We started chatting about business communication and he remarked that he receives upwards of 300 e-mails per day. Every day.

I asked Steve if all of the those messages were important and he chuckled. Many of them weren't—maybe even most, he told me. Intrigued, I asked him for a recent example of a completely superfluous message.