In today’s episode we’re diving into our email inbox. Checking out the inbox is a good indicator of how someone is balancing working on the business versus in the business. By looking into someone’s inbox, you can get a good idea of the activities those individuals are working on throughout the day. That, however, doesn’t indicate productivity.
“A World Without Email” is a leap into the future. Most of the communication between employees, customers, and so on is done through email. The assumption is the faster you can answer an email, the faster the business can run. On the surface, that assumption makes sense. As a result, however, a lot of the business ends up “living” out of an inbox.
Studies show that the average American worker checks their email every 6 minutes. A heavy email user checks their email every minute. This leads to less productivity and more disruption. It can take 5 to 15 minutes to get engaged back into work after a disruption.
This constant disruption disturbs the ability to think deeply. Deep thinking gives us more creativity, better problem solving, and organization. There is a lot of value in being able to think deeply in business and in our personal lives, so we need to find mechanisms to be able to step away from those disruptions.
There are practical solutions. One simple example is setting a time to check your email and sticking to that allotted time. It needs to be understood that not every email is an emergency. By doing this, you can shift your focus from life and business running you, to you running life and business.
Recent Comments