To Send Or Share That Is The Question

We live in an email dominated world. Hardly anyone gives a thought about sending a document with an attachment. Despite the advances in online collaborative tools we are all prone to just attaching a document and sending it to several people for review and comment.

But have you stopped to consider the productivity consequences of this practice. Just think about what happens after this initial act of sending an attachment. The recipient reads the document and either makes a change in the document, adds a comment or even replies to you or forwards on the document making their comments in the email reply. This process can be repeated several times. Several days later, you now have several emails which contains some comments as well as attachments of the document you sent out with revisions. The question now is what is the current state of the document. You guessed it, you have to follow the whole trail to find out.

Online web based applications such as Google Docs all but eliminates this problem by having only one copy of the document filed on the internet which you share with the people whom you need to work on it. They make their changes or add comments to the document and these are updated immediately making it visible to the next person who views the document. In fact the enhancements to Google docs now allow more than one person to open and work on the document simultaneously.

The productivity gains of working in this manner is so easily overlooked unless you take a moment to consider the total impact on everyone who touches the document. Even if you consider that it takes a mere 2 minutes to initiate a reply to an email and attached a changed document, if the process is repeated 5 times for a single document thats already 10 minutes. Then if you now take into account perhaps 5 mins to ascertain the most current status of the document this adds another 25 mins giving a total of already 35 minutes in total for just one iteration. Now if you consider that you get on average 3 documents a day thats a total of 105 mins lost in a day. So what may seem to be just a few minutes to you as an individual is no longer insignificant when taken together as a whole for all the people within your organisation just on a simple activity as reviewing a document.

This is the kind of productivity gains that is so blindingly obvious that you wonder why we still cling to the "attach and send" way of doing things. There are real cost savings to such simple changes which have nothing to do with how sexy the technology is (although it helps with adoption). This is at the heart of the new generation of online web based applications. It is sad that we often get so carried away with wanting to customise software so that it works exactly the way we want it to that we miss the obvious opportunities to do things simpler and better by taking steps out of the process.