Nick Bilton
of the NYtimes published the following article: (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/life%E2%80%99s-too-short-for-so-much-e-mail/?ref=technology)
The article
describes a common problem for many of us: the “e-mail issue”. How often do we
feel buried below dozens and dozens of daily e-mails? Which ultimately makes us
feel “miserable and frustrated” about the activity of e-mail management.
Royal
Pingdom, a company that publishes studies on internet usage, estimated that in
2010, 107 trillion e-mails were sent. At
the same time Radicati, a market research firm, calculated that in 2011, 3.1
billion e-mail accounts were active and that, on average, every corporate
employee sent and received 105 e-mails a day. Adding on that, University of
California published a study which shows that people who did not look at
e-mail regularly at work were less stressed and more productive than others.
Gloria
Mark, an informatics professor who studies the effects of e-mail says that the
biggest problem with e-mail is that there isn’t an off switch. “E-mail is an
asynchronous technology, so you don’t need to be on it to receive a message. Synchronous
technologies, like instant messenger, depend on people being present. Although
some people allow their instant messenger services to save offline messages,
most cannot receive messages if they are not logged on. With e-mail, it is
different. If you go away, e-mails pile up waiting for your return.”
So, is
there a solution? I am scared there is none. Anyhow, there are for sure some
“rules” that can help us in saving time and make our e-mail management activity
more productive and less time consuming. Here I report four of them, which I
found while searching for effective email management advices on the web:
1) Establish
a regular block of time each day to answer e-mails
2)
Prioritize your emails and answer only the most important
3) Answer
your emails not individually, but in batches
4) Consider a branding statement as part of
your e-mail signature
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