How do some recent international survey results regarding e-mail use compared to your office?

If you think about it, Microsoft Outlook (or whatever e-mail management program you are using) is most probably the only piece of software that is open on everybody’s computer constantly throughout the day.
There is no question that e-mail is now an integral part of most people’s work practices.

Of course this is both a benefit as well as a problem. While e-mail has liberated us in so many ways, the very fact that Outlook is open all the time and beckons us to read each and every e-mail instantly when it arrives into our inbox means that a significant amount of our valuable time is taken up with reading and responding to e-mail.

In recent survey conducted by a leading e-mail management organisation, Mike Song from a company called Cohesive Knowledge concluded that e-mail is a much bigger problem when it comes to managing time
than most people thought. Here are some of the results from his survey.

* Professionals reported spending 2 hours per day
processing email with 30 minutes of this time occurring
after normal business hours.

* Professionals indicated that 25% of email processing
time is wasted. This equates to 15 wasted days per
year per employee. For an enterprise with 10,000
employees, this equates to an annual loss of $152
million in wages.

* Professionals now receive an average of 41 emails per
day.

* 88% agreed that they often receive unnecessary email.

* 75% indicated that their co-workers often over-use the
reply-to-all feature yet remarkably only 14% claimed
that they, themselves, over-use this feature.

* 55% reported that the quality of email at their
enterprise is ‘poor to fair’.

* 54% often receive warnings that their inbox is over-the-
limit.

* Although professionals now send and receive an average
of 19,200 emails per year, only 12% of those surveyed
had ever experienced email productivity training.

Although this information was based mostly around North American data, I’m quite sure but the results will be similar in Australia, New Zealand and some parts of Asia.

What do you think of these survey results? Do you agree or disagree? Do you find that e-mail is consuming a significant part of the time? Do you find that there is never enough time in your day because e-mail interruption constantly?

If you have answered yes to any of my questions, then I may have a solution. As we will discuss in the coming articles, Zero Inbox is a training program and system designed to help managers and employees in organisations across Australia and New Zealand reduce the inbox to zero and finally getting control of the e-mail and the e-mail processes.

While we can’t always stop professional and business e-mail arriving in our inbox, there are many things that we can do as users of e-mail, to reduce the feeling of overwhelm around our inbox and e-mail processes.