Email is great but

Email is now a ubiquitous part of everyday life, whether at home or at work, chances are that everyday you’ll be using email. Email has provided us significant benefits including being able to communicate with family and friends in far away locations, and the ability to receive information in a convenient and environmentally friendly way. However, have you ever stopped and considered that perhaps emails have also increased frustrations and lowered productivity levels?

Many people now dread the thought of opening their emails on Monday morning not only because there is already so much stuff there but the knowledge that even more stuff will soon arrive. This deluge of information, if not handled correctly, places a significant burden on the way people work, making them less productive and costing the business money. The major issue is that no one really shows people how to use email. They are simply expected to know!

The reality

Dr. Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by e-mail. So people who check their e-mail every five minutes waste 8 ½ hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.

While e–mail is a legitimate – and vital – part of today’s workplace, much of it simply isn’t. Intel employees spend an average of some three hours per day processing e–mail. About 30 percent of messages (one million per day) are unnecessary. The unnecessary fraction consumes about 20 minutes every day. That’s fully paid time not devoted to useful work, spent creating, forwarding, opening, reading, and processing messages whose real value is less than the time consumed.

A survey, of 4,000 people from 150 UK businesses, showed that the average worker wastes one hour every day through inefficient use of email.

A recent survey found that more than half of those asked spent two hours a day looking at emails while a quarter had at least 200 messages in their inbox at any time because they have no time to clear them.

A solution

In most cases you can easily remove these major frustrations by simply re-configuring your email program. The problem is that no one ever shows you how to do this!

The first place to start is to download our FREE The problems with emails document which will help you better understand the productivity problems that you may face.

From there, the Computer Information Agency has two solutions that can help remove these frustrations and allow you become immediately more productive with email. You’ll be amazed at the difference.

Enhanced Email productivity quick start booklet

We can provide all the information needed to configure your Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2003 email program to overcome these five major frustrations in a simple and easy to understand format. Not only that, we’ll also throw in five additional configuration and usage techniques that make you even more productive with emails. All this is set out with comprehensive screenshots of each step in the configuration process. Nothing could be simpler or cheaper for overcoming the five most common sources of email frustration and with an additional 5 techniques included, every employee should have one.

Overcoming email frustrations in Outlook 2007
Overcoming email frustrations in Outlook 2003

Enhanced Email productivity seminars

If your business wants employees to be more effective and efficient then consider our productivity seminars. Delivered at your office, these sessions demonstrate how to be more effective with email as well as other common technology. We’ll work with you and your staff to ensure that you not only understand Outlook better but you’ll also understand how to deal with emails more effectively.
Our seminars go beyond dealing with frustrations and examine issues of etiquette, formatting, when not to use emails and how to process email less and get more real work done. The seminars are tailored to suit your organizations needs and include comprehensive documentation and on-going support. Contact us for an initial consultation which is completely free and without obligation  or download a brochure.

Smarter Productiviy

There are many simple ways that workplace productivity can boosted. For further information about these please see our Smarter productivity section, where you can learn how to use things like advanced searching, web applications and collaboration tools to improve effectiveness and save time and money.

Across the industry, knowledge workers and managers are thinking less, inventing less, producing less, succeeding less. Don't let this happen to you.  Contact us for more information about how we can help.