Most people don't dispute that they suffer from email overload. A recent report from Basex in the NYTimes revealed that people spend 28% of their day interrupted by things like unnecessary email. However, what we do about our overload is a source of much debate.

Socialtext has connected the dots between a few reports to discover that a great deal of our email comes from handling exceptions. Because business processes don't have a system to translate them into practice, we spend more than a quarter of our day emailing about the exceptions to the business process rules.
 
Worse than the volume of email is the amount of mental energy required by each email recipient, ergo worker, to parse each exception and determine what to do with it. E-mail was once intended to increase productivity and has now become so voluminous it is counter productive. Basex determined that business loose $650 billion in productivity due to the unnecessary email interruptions.  And, the average number of corporate emails sent and received per person per day expected to reach over 228 by 2010.
 
Socialtext has been building out business practice support using their customizable Enterprise 2.0 platform to return email back to its rightful place in the communication stratigraphy,  which is not as the catch-all for exception handling. Their business social software makes the process more productive, reducing email by 30%. With the growth in the remote workforce, global coverage, proliferation of mobile devices, and social technologies; collaboration is the solution to improve the effectiveness of communication and address these forces.