With a little bit of ‘medicine’ from email Doctor, Monica Seeley and fellow international email management expert, Marsha Egan, you can cure yourself of email addiction and make yourself and your organisation more productive and happier.
They point out that there’s a huge financial incentive for firms to confront email overload. One major Fortune 500 company recently estimated that information overload impacts its bottom line by about $1 billion per year. This is why author of Brilliant Email, Dr Monica Seeley and Marsha Egan, author of Inbox Detox, are again challenging businesses and individuals throughout the world to ‘clean out their inboxes’. Their goal is to provide business leaders with the tools and incentive to change business email culture to enable them and their colleagues to make 2012 the year they really combat email overload.
“Most of us need less than half the email we receive. This costs us and our organisations dearly in terms of stress and time as on average, one hour, per person is lost every working day through ineffective use of email. That’s about £4,200 of lost productivity per person, per year, at an average hourly cost of £20 – that’s a substantial and unnecessary business overhead in the current economic climate,” states Monica.
In the UK and Europe, businesses and individuals can join in and get a daily dose of helpful tips and hints to slim their inboxes by reading daily postings on Dr Seeley’s blog http://twitter.com/EmailDoctor. Monica and Marsha will also hold two live ‘surgeries’ via Twitter Tweet Chats from 6.00-7.00 pm on January 23 and January 25 providing instant prescriptions to
treat and clean up inboxes.
Research companies estimate that worldwide we received 2.8 million emails per second in 2010. Globally that’s about 72 emails per person per day. In the UK Monica’s own data indicates that nearly half of us regularly receive over 50-70 emails per day and some receive over 180. So although social media is now the communications channel of choice for many of our social interactions, in business, the numbers show that email is not going away anytime soon.
So companies of every kind are now seeking ways to help their workers deal better with being bombarded with information at all hours of the day via e-mail, instant messages and social media. For example Volkswagen has imposed a total block on email being pushed to workers Blackberrys in the evening.
“Although, this is a step in the right direction it is a bit like taking a sledge hammer to crack a nut. Responsible business leaders need to educate employees to use email in a more manageable and responsible way. This includes better planning about what response you require and by when. Unrealistic email response times create huge pressure and workplace stress which can lead to errors and lack of governance.” Comments Dr Monica Seeley