I just returned from 4 days leave in New Caledonia (yes it was very hot and relaxing!)
However, today I decided to get on top of my email before I head back to the office tomorrow. Once Outlook sync’d up I had 329 emails.
While sometimes I average over 200 emails/day, 80/day while on leave was quite a surprise!
I read once that email generates email, and I have had first hand experience that the more I send the more I receive – and fortunately the less I sent also resulted in less received.
All in all, not too sure how I received 80+ emails/day when I wasn’t sending any.
Anyway this reminded me of a post I recently read discussing the idea of an email charter:
Houston, we have a problem.
We all love the power of email connecting people across continents. But… we’re drowning in it.
Every year it gets a little worse. To the point where we can get trapped spending most of our working week simply handling the contents of our in-boxes.
And in doing so, we’re making the problem worse. Every reply, every cc, creates new work for our friends and colleagues.
We need to figure out a better way.
But how?
Here is the key cause of this problem:
The total time taken to respond to an email is often MORE than the time it took to create it.
The full post is definitely worth a read and to date there have been over 200 responses.
The overall result of the post has been the creation of http://emailcharter.org/