Open Thread: The value and quality of email at work
Submitted by Merlin on November 2, 2005 - 4:55am.
40% of office workers spend 0.5-3 hours reading poorly written e-mail | IT Facts | ZDNet.com
More with the email research results:
Information Mapping claims that 80% of those surveyed deem email writing skills are extremely or very important to the effectiveness of doing their jobs. 65% of the respondents spend from 1-3 hours per day reading and writing emails, with 40% “wasting” 30 minutes to 3 hours reading “ineffectively” written emails.
Things is, I keep encountering people who get 100, 200, 300, or more actionable emails each day; not cron notifications, bug list CCs, or lunch at Chili’s for Suzie from AR’s birthday–I’m talking about real emails that require more than a one-line response or represent some kind of non-email work.
What amazes me is how much of people’s email seems to be internal to their company, business unit, or direct team. If I ran a company and learned that most of my employees were spending that much time touching internal email, I’d ask my managers: “For how many and which employees is six hours of email each day adding value to the company?” Maybe that’s just me.
Understand: I get that email is the way teams communicate on important stuff, but at a certain point, we’re back to the guy from Metropolis, aren’t we? I realize my view on this stuff is extreme – I’m a hobo and I work at home – but you tell me:
- How efficient is your team and your company at using email?
- How much of your day is spent dealing with email that does Good Things for your job or helps increase the value of that for which you’re paid?
- How much is spent just sorting, shuffling, and mining?
- What one change in your team’s email culture would most improve the way you work together?
Feel free to elaborate. And feel free to say you love getting all that email. I’d enjoy hearing a range of views on this.
Also: Non-scientific email poll
How many actionable emails do you get each day? That’s email that requires more than a one-line response or requests non-email work.
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Actionable e-mails: Maybe 20. However,...
Actionable e-mails: Maybe 20. However, in my office we’ve all developed that bad habbit of having total conversations via e-mail. What could be accomplished in a 30 second phone call, or even a chat session ends up taking 4 to 5 back and forth e-mails. We’re lame.
I always know I’m being successful when my Inbox has less than 10 e-mails.
Personal e-mails, I tend to suck at. They sit in my inbox for way to long. I ditched Gmail yesterday for just this reason: messages got totally lost in “conversation” view. I’d love to have the option to view coversation view, or tradition view. Maybe someday. In the meantime, I ditched Gmail because e-mails weren’t getting answered, my contacts were a mess, and there’s still no Gmail Calendar. I’m sure eventually this will get sorted out - in the meantie I feel a bit silly for depending on anything beta.