THE BRAZEN CAREERIST- Finally, now: The end of email

The vast majority of electronic communication today is via social media, according to Paul Greenberg, a relationship management consultant. At first, I didn't believe it; but then I thought about the viral nature of communication via social networks, and the statistic started to make sense.

So, I have been thinking for a while that I need to stop using email. Here's why.

1. Email is inefficient

Email is one-to-one communication, and social networking is one-to-many communication. If you have something meaningful or thoughtful to say, why not say it to many people? It would mean that more people share ideas and more people understand your way of thinking. Also, there are so many pieces of our life that we tell at different times to different people. Why not just say it once? We all have email overload: we parse our messages into 40 one-to-one messages instead of just a single one-to-many message.

Email is also an inefficient way to hone your writing skills. A Stanford study shows that people develop better writing in social media than in the classroom. In the classroom, you write for a single reader, the teacher, who is a captive audience. It's her job to read your writing. But in social media, you have to persuade a group of readers to accept your way of thinking, and you have to be interesting. So you will get better and better at your job– which is, for all of us on some level, communicating– if you use social media instead of email.

2. The intimacy of email is overrated

If you want intimate communication, send a handwritten letter. I receive one of these almost every week, so I know the custom is not dead. And I pay attention to them much more than email. The act of seeing someone's handwriting is intimate because handwriting reveals so much about a person. Email is not intimate. It's a workplace tool, and it's also a pile of junk we're always trying to get to the bottom of.

Most of the information you send via email is for work, (which is the premise of Seth Godin's recent advice about using email). Email is not a good tool for ideas. It's a good tool for sniggling details. You don't want to spend your life in the irrelevant details of mundane tasks. So the fewer emails you send, the more time you spend in the realm of either execution or ideas– more powerful than details. Execution happens outside of email, and ideas should happen in groups– which means social networks.

3. Your privacy is overrated

First of all, you don't have a lot of privacy. You are getting everything online for free, and in exchange you are letting someone sell your data. You don't have enough money or enough time in your life to use the Internet in a way that does not invade your privacy. But, so what? The value of your privacy is very little in the age of transparency and authenticity. Privacy is almost always a way of hiding things that don't need hiding.

In social media, the relevant parts of you will fall to the relevant places, which is why you can be your true self wherever you go, and it's okay that you don't have privacy. Your employer is not interested in your profile on Facebook because it doesn't reveal anything about how you perform at work– it reveals what you're like at a party. Employers will read the parts of you that are professional, and friends will read your personal announcements.

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Penelope Trunk has started several companies and worked for many more.

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