One of my goals this year is to spend much less time on email – which has been a productivity killer for me.
I began researching different strategies to cut down my time in my inbox and want to share some strategies that I’ve learned lately.
First, some fascinating facts about how email kills our productivity:
According to a July 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report on “the social economy,” the average knowledge worker now spends 28% of her work time managing email. If you work 50 hours per week, that’s 14 hours stuck in the inbox. – CNN
A study on a group of workers at Microsoft took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming email or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse the web. – New York Times
In 2005, a psychiatrist at King’s College London did a study in which one group was asked to take an IQ test while doing nothing, and a second group to take an IQ test while distracted by e-mails and ringing telephones. The uninterrupted group did better by an average of ten points, which wasn’t much of a surprise. What was a surprise is that the e-mailers also did worse, by an average of six points, than a group in a similar study that had been tested while stoned. That’s right. Stoned. Those people were literally burned out, and they did better. – New York Magazine
If you’re the type to meticulously file your emails in various folders in your client, stop, says a new study from IBM Research. By analyzing 345 users’ 85,000 episodes of digging through old emails in search of the one they needed, researchers discovered that those who did no email organizing at all found them faster than those who filed them in folders. – MIT Technology Review
Here are 7 ways that I’m reducing time in my email:
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