Chris Anderson’s take on the cause of email overload:

E-mail is easier to create than to respond to. This seems counterintuitive — after all, it’s quicker to read than to write. But reading a message is just the start. It may contain a hard-to-answer question, such as “What are your thoughts on this?” Or a link to a Web page. Or an attachment. And it may be copied to a dozen other people, all of whom will soon chime in with their own comments. Every hour spent writing and sending messages consumes more than an hour of the combined attention of the various recipients. And so, without meaning to, we’re all creating a growing problem for one another.

It’s a modern “tragedy of the commons.” The commons in question here is the world’s pool of attention. Instant communication makes it a little too easy to grab a piece of that attention. The result of all those little acts of grabbing is a giant drain on our time, energy and sanity.

The cure? The Email Charter.

Why a charter? Because to fix a communal problem, a community needs to come together and agree to new rules…

The 10 points we ended up with on the charter all encourage senders to reduce the time, effort and stress required of responders. The first point is reinforced by the rest: Respect recipients’ time. The charter also reminds people that short or slow responses aren’t rude, that copying dozens of people on a conversation is burdensome and that subject lines should clearly label the topic. (Additional advice in the “celebrate clarity” section: Avoid strange fonts and colors.) The point is not just to change how you e-mail, but to consider whether you should even be sending an e-mail in the first place.

The charter grew from a blog post asking for reader suggestions.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Carbon NYC via Nick Mehta in Mashble last July, 4 Reasons Why Email Overload Is Your Own Fault [OPINION]