ShareThisCountless people begin a new year with resolutions to lose a few pounds. But perhaps even more people could boost their productivity, and consequently their self-esteem, by losing a few hundred e-mails.
"E-mail has become the biggest interrupter of the universe," says Martha Egan, an executive coach from Reading, Pa., who has declared this week "Clean Out Your Inbox Week." She says companies rarely notice the impact of those interruptions because it occurs in such small increments.
But those increments pile up. When a worker stops what they're doing to check an e-mail that just arrived, it takes four minutes to return their full attention to their work, Egan said.
So it takes only 15 e-mails to use up an hour of time.
Add to that the fact that the average employee receives 15 to 80 e-mails a day, and the potential waste of employee time -- and company money -- stops looking small.
For those who want to get serious about trimming their e-mail inboxes, here is the short course (for Egan's full treatment, visit www.inboxdetox.com).
First, take ownership of when you view your e-mail. Instead of leaving your e-mail program running all day and notifying you each time a new e-mail arrives, check your e-mail at set intervals. For most people, Egan said, five e-mail checks a day is plenty, and many people could get by with two.
"People give power to the ding and the flash, just as someone might interrupt a romantic dinner to answer the phone," she said.
That's bad for a romantic dinner, and it's bad for work.
Second, change the way you approach your inbox.
Many people use the inbox like "a very disorganized to-do list," Egan said. As a result, the average person reads and rereads an e-mail seven times before acting on it -- the digital equivalent of putting mail back into your mailbox.
"I don't know anybody who puts stuff back in their USPS mail box," she said. "What they do is sort. Shift your thinking from going into your inbox with the intention of working your e-mail to going in with the intention of sorting it."
How to sort? Simply, with three categories: e-mails requiring action (with flags to remind you when to act), e-mails to hold as reference files, and e-mails to delete.
"Look at an e-mail no more than twice," she suggested. "The first time is to sort it, and the second time is to work it."
If you have an overstuffed inbox, Egan said not to try to tame it all at once; never spend more than an hour at a time on it. But you still don't have to delay your gratification.
By creating a temporary folder, dating it and moving your inbox contents into it, you can experience the feeling of a clean inbox even as you continue the work of sorting that temporary folder.
While managing e-mail ultimately falls upon the individual, Egan said companies could make things better all around by training employees in e-mail management, which is where she comes in. But it's not always easy.
"For a company to embark on a campaign to get people to use their e-mail differently sounds silly," she said. "I can go to a 40-person company and tell them that I can save them thousands a year, and it's still a hard sell."
(E-mail Elwin Green at egreen(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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