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Feeding The Email Beast Takes Time And Money


It's no longer rare for a worker to get hundreds of emails a day. Account Executive Ellen Rose says, "Nobody communicates via phone anymore. It's all done through email." And fellow salesperson Jamie Bandley chimes in, "If I'm not in the office answering email and corresponding with my clients, then I have it on my phone and I probably look at it every few minutes."  

Experts estimate workers now spend as much as an hour a day handling email. That's 250 hours a year, actually a full month and half at work doing nothing but handling email!  Even at $10 per hour a large office could easily be spending a quarter of a million dollars a year to feed the email monster.

So what can we do to tame the beast?

--For starters-- treat email like snail mail. Set a couple of times in the day to read your email to minimize interruptions.

--Technology is your friend. Setup filters or rules on your mail program to automatically sort your mail into manageable categories.

--And your inbox is not a storage box. If you're going to keep your email, create a file for them outside of your inbox. 

And one final piece of advice: If it's old and you haven't used it in ages, learn to let go. Just block and delete.

By Fred Cantu