We hear of it all the time these days. Email, from being a handy communications channel, is now seen by many as a dreaded, insidious intruder. I’m not one of those many, as you can tell.

Stop it! When are you going to grow up? Calling email a menace, labelling it as passe, is akin to this ridiculous thing called the “War on Terror”. Might as well have a war against iPhones. Or Android, for that matter. Stop taking in all this tripe and start using your brains for once.

Actually, you don’t need much skull juice for email. What you need is Diligence, Orderliness, Decisiveness, Punctuality, Discernment and Sensitivity. There was a time in my life when I routinely received a few hundred email messages per day, I kid you not. Just deal with it! If you need to clarify something, pick the phone up and call. If that doesn’t settle it, walk over to the other person and sort it out. STOP cc-ing and bcc-ing to the rest of humanity who are neither involved nor interested in what’s going on down your particular well. Get a Management Information System or equivalent, whatever works for you, or use stuff like Google Docs or something.

Email is not evil. The misuse of email is.