Here’s an interesting piece of data.
In reviewing the electronic records of the past 6 years of my working life, I have received over 70,000 emails that need responding to (add another 30,000 that were trivial, but needed to be reviewed before deleting).
Give 3 minutes to read, process and respond to those emails, that totals nearly 2 years of full time work employment just doing that. That’s 1/3 of the past 6 years total work time.
Considering that more than half of them could have been avoided by simple conversations with people directly, that’s at least a 17% loss in productivity just because people choose email as a primary communication form rather than engaging in direct discussion.
Kinda scary.
Too many people use email as a way to clear something off their desk and throw it on someone else’s desk...often engaging several more people than needed to be involved. A question that could be answered in a 2 minute phone call sometimes takes days to resolve and swirls up more engagement by multiple people than is necessary. It’s too easy to copy the World on something they don’t need to pay attention to, but now are forced to because it arrives in their in-box.
We are far too rapidly becoming the disconnected “connected” society...and what once improved efficiency now severely degrades it.
