Here is a startling bit of arithmetic: If you get and send 100 e-mails a day, that adds up to 24,000 messages annually, on which you probably spend an average of 100 workdays. If you could manage to reduce the amount of e-mail you send and receive by 20%, you’d free up 20 workdays a year to use for other things, like thinking up new ideas that could help further your career or, heck, taking a longer vacation.
So say co-authors Mike Song, Vicki Halsey, and Tim Burress in a book called The Hamster Revolution: Stop Info-Glut and Reclaim Your Life! (Berrett-Koehler, $19.95). Song and Burress are co-founders of a consulting firm, Cohesive Knowledge Solutions (www.cohesiveknowledge.com), that helps companies cut down on wasted e-mail; Halsey is vice president of applied learning at the Ken Blanchard Companies (www.kenblanchard.com). Together and separately, they’ve coached thousands of employees at HP, Nike, Oracle, Wells Fargo, Pfizer, and Procter & Gamble, among others.
And why do these companies care how much time people spend on e-mail? Well, time is money. Let’s suppose, for instance, that dealing with your e-mail sucks up 75 days a year, and one-third of that time is thrown away on useless tasks like reading “reply to all” messages that don’t concern you or figuring out how to answer long, convoluted questions. Using an average knowledge-worker salary of $30 per hour, the authors point out that the cost of 25 wasted days is about $6,000 a year per employee – or, from the company point of view, $6 million per 1,000 knowledge workers. Yikes.
So how can you cut back on the time e-mail takes up (not to mention the aggravation it can cause)? Ten suggestions that may help:
