Productivity Tip: What To Do When You’ve Got Too Much Email

If the average office worker spends over 26% of their workday on email, can we streamline to recover the precious commodity of time? Or is it better to ignore a growing inbox?

Too-Much-EmailAccording to a recent McKinsey Global Institute report on “the social economy,” the average knowledge worker now spends more than 26% of their work time managing email. If you work 50 hours per week, that’s 14 hours stuck in the inbox. McKinsey’s report suggested that workers could improve their email productivity by 25-30% through better use of social collaboration platforms, buying back 7-8.5% of their workweek. But even if your company isn’t investing in such platforms, here are four solutions that can help you get your head out of the inbox for a few of those 14 hours:

Automate
Use professional and/or branded signatures for your emails. After pointing, clicking, and the auto insert is finished – so is your sign off. This small action can save your audience significant time and effort if they need to speak with you urgently by phone as a follow up or email connections are slowing the progress toward your goal.

Take a closer look at those subscriptions
Ask yourself if you really need that subscription. Additional analysis that included 5 million emails from Baydin, an email management service, detailing that the average email user gets 147 messages per day and deletes 71 (48%). Deletion takes an average of 3.2 seconds. Granted, that doesn’t seem like much – about 4 minutes per day – but if you’re deleting 350 emails per workweek, that takes around 20 minutes per week, which adds up to more than 16 hours per year.

Or look at it this way: According to the American Time Use Survey, the average married, employed father who has children under age 6 spends just 2.4 minutes per day reading to them — which is less time than the average email user spends deleting emails. Play offense with your inbox by getting yourself off any lists you don’t read, and unsubscribing to commercial messages.

Avoid using folders
Hunting through folders can kill productivity. One paper from Carnegie Mellon University found that over 30% of email users agree with the statement, “I file my messages into folders as soon as I have read them.” Filing seems productive, but according to Alex Moore, CEO of Baydin, creating files associated with different projects or people is the least efficient way to find emails you might need again in the future – less efficient, in fact, then scrolling back through your inbox trying to remember roughly when the needed email came in. Which is exactly what this leader does 90% of the time. Solution: You can create one “archive” folder if you like to keep your inbox empty, but use the search function to find any information you need.

Check your timing
Timing is critical. Studies show that the average email user writes 40 messages a day, but there’s no point writing these emails if they don’t get read. A message sent at 6 a.m. is more likely to be opened than one sent to ask someone to do something, you’re more likely to get what you want after their blood sugar is up. For additional tips watch this video by Fast Company that is part of their working smart series.

If you are able to follow these simple strategies – the odds are favorable that you will get more done in a shorter amount of time.

9 thoughts on “Productivity Tip: What To Do When You’ve Got Too Much Email

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>