Ostermann Research’s second annual “Mobile Messaging Study” polled employees at businesses to learn about their email habits and found that 95 percent of those surveyed check their business email outside of work, and 78 percent checked email while in the bathroom…
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We’re starting a new feature called “Ask Marsha.” So many of you have emailed me with individual questions, many answers which can be helpful to the rest of us. Here’s the first we’re publishing, from “Roz”
Hi Marsha:
I have a question. Thanks to your wisdom I now have literally dozens of email files in my Outlook and save material appropriately, which is very useful.
My question is, can these files get too large for my computer? I’m at a point at which I have more valuable content saved in Outlook than in the rest of my computer due to the enormous email traffic I get daily. Can Outlook handle all this?
Dear Roz: The answer is YES, definitely. You do need to be cautious about overloading your email system. If you overburden it, you risk crashing the system, and losing everything.
The good news is that the answer may be easier than you think…
Most of the space used in your email is in your attachments. It’s been estimated that 85% of storage space is used up by attachments. Many of these documents have graphics, are lengthy, or are detailed. Additionally, many of them get saved, or sent and resent, so there may be more than one of the same large attachment in your Outlook sent mail.
So, the first place to clear out is your ‘Sent Mail.” This is the ‘low hanging fruit.’ Even if you don’t want to go through all of your Sent Mail, sort by those that have attachments, or by size, and purge the larger files, or save them to your hard drive…
Another best practice is to save the larger files to your hard drive. You can indicate the file name and path (where you store it) on the email. Again, it is relatively easy to find these attachments by sorting by message size or whether they have an attachment.
Other size busters include managing the email you send, to reduce its size:
Let me know what you think, Roz!
There are so many things on our to do lists, that we’ll never get it all done.
While the challenge is to work smarter rather than longer, sometimes it is didfficult to know what that means.
Here is a great post that may enlighten you:
Today’s free resource comes with a slight hitch. For you to receive this five-page PDF of e-mail best practices, you have got to have an empty inbox!
After all, it is Clean Out Your Inbox Week, isn’t it? Email that screen print to us at info@marshaegan.com, and we will send you a link for this five-page PDF, entitled “Reduce Your Email, Reclaim Your Productivity.”
Good stuff — we promise!
Be sure to subscribe to our e-mailed blog posts or RSS feeds to make sure you receive all of the tips and hints that will help you clean out your own inbox, and those of those around you during” Clean Out Your Inbox Week” January 25-29.
Throughout the week we will offer helpful tips, free downloads, and other tools that businesses or individuals who want to take control of their inboxes can use on our blog, www.inboxdetox.com <http://www.inboxdetox.com/> .
Between reading, responding, and recovery time, the average email interruption takes four minutes of valuable work time. If a worker receives an average of 15 email interruptions per day, one hour of time is lost to email interruptions. If that worker is part of a 20-person department, 20 hours of work time are lost per day. Then, if the employees average $20 per hour, the company loses $2000 per week due to a loss of worker productivity.
There is a cure for our current email e-ddiction. If you practice productive email habits, you will not only loosen the grip email has on you, but you will also reclaim hours of productive time every day.
For more information on “Clean Out Your Inbox Week” visit the website at EganEmailSolutions.com <http://www.eganemailsolutions.com/inboxweek.html> .
From January 25-29, 2010, we are challenging businesses and organizations throughout the world to take control of their email and regain lost time and profits.
Over the past decade, email usage has surged to staggering figures. Now, it is estimated that 247 billion emails are sent each day. Put another way, email users worldwide produce messages greater in size than over 16,000 copies of the complete works of Shakespeare each second! The 2008 AOL Email Addiction Survey revealed that 62% of at-work email users check their work email over an average weekend and more than 50% of Americans check their work email while on vacation. These shocking statistics go on, and it’s clear that in the new decade, email users must take control their email before it controls them.
Email is a very effective communication tool upon which businesses rely heavily. However, we have developed a dependency on email that saps productivity. Many people can’t keep up with their inbox and simply declare email bankruptcy.
“Clean Out Your Inbox Week” is a focused attempt to get businesses and organizations to work together to not only clean out their inboxes, but to take control of the e-mail Tiger that has invaded their business productivity. Whether the organization wants to set up their own program or use a tool that we have created – “Clean Out Your Inbox Week” eKit, the objective of this focused week is to help all participating organizations reclaim productivity that has been lost. Visit http://eganemailsolutions.com/inboxweek.html for tools to help you add megabucks to your bottom line…
Winter Clear-Out!
Is Your Inbox Screaming At You?
Bursting At the Seams?
Packed Full With Old Emails That Should Be Given The 3 D’s Approach?
Do it, Delegate it or DITCH IT!
Do It Now!
Read the full article on Michelle Waitte’s blog, Life Success Formula at http://bit.ly/8PvpZM
Are you one of those people who checks his or her inbox – ahem – incessantly?
You know, every time you pause from a task. Or every time you hang up from a phone call? Or, in the middle of tasks, when you’re “thinking?”
Try this: Make a tic mark EVERY time you check your email. Don’t count ‘em up until you’re through with work. Then at the end of the day, count them up. You could be very unhappily surprised with the result.
Each one of those tic marks costs you. It costs you productivity. It costs you focus. It costs you money.
Here’s a challenge: Take that number, and divide it by ten. In other words, if you checked 71 times, your resulting number is 7. Set the resulting number as your target for checking email in a day. Then, post that number on your CRT, or somewhere where you can’t miss it. Then work on resisting your incessant email checking.
Remember – we recommend checking email only 5 times daily. It works for us, and can work for you.
Let us know how it goes.
Email is here to stay. It is very quickly becoming the primary communication tool in business. And if you want to hold back your career with your email practices, here are a few hints that can help you:
1. Waste peoples’ time. The more you annoy people by creating extra work through a myriad of bonehead maneuvers like sending unnecessary emails, forgetting attachments, and inserting HUGE graphics, the less they will think of your business communications skills.
2. Send poorly written emails. Use improper grammar, spelling and punctuation. Use run on sentences.
3. Make sure you don’t use spell check.
4. Bury the point of your communication in the middle of the message. By making it very hard for people to know what it is you are trying to convey, you will be sure to make a name for yourself in business circles.
5. Forward lengthy chain emails, saying “see below.” A great way to call attention to your lack of respect for the receiver is to forward an email that has at least 10 previously forwarded emails contained in it. This forces the recipient to have to read through all 10 to try to figure out what is important.
6. Copy as many people as you can. This one is more subtle. By adding many extra recipients, you might think you’re communicating, but what you’re really doing is adding more work to peoples’ already full plates. They may not catch on to this one right away, but over time, you won’t be able to hide.
7. Gossip via email. Even though you think that your friend won’t rat you out over the gossip you sent – hey, it is a permanent record, and that “friend” could be as catty as you!
8. Put several names in the “To:” line
9. Write long and rambling emails.
10. Send emails between 1am and 5am.
RePrinting: BASEX:COMMENTARY-OF-THE-WEEK BY JONATHAN B. SPIRA
E-MAIL: REPORTS OF MY DEMISE ARE PREMATURE
It is both premature and foolhardy to proclaim that e-mail’s reign as “king of communications” is over as a recent Wall Street Journal article trumpets.
Not that e-mail is the best communications medium for everything; indeed we know very well it isn’t.
Instead, e-mail has, in the past 15 years in particular, become that path of least resistance for almost everything that transpires within an organization.
Update status? Send an e-mail to a few hundred of one’s closest colleagues.
Finish a report? Send another e-mail to a few hundred of one’s closest colleagues.
The fact is that we use e-mail opportunistically rather than with an understanding as to what the impact of its use might be.
Sending that status report to those few hundred colleagues actually cost the organization ca. 24 hours in lost time when one calculates the few minutes each person spent opening the e-mail he didn’t need to receive in the first place – plus the “recovery time,” which is the time it takes to get back to where one was in the task that was interrupted.
The result of all of our communications (and it isn’t just e-mail) is Information Overload, a problem that costs the U.S. economy ca. $900 billion per annum. On August 12, Information Overload Awareness Day was observed around the world with meetings and discussions (see http://www.basexblog.com/2009/07/09/information-overload-awareness-day/).
But that’s just one day – each additional day that we don’t address the problem of Information Overload and take steps to lessen its impact costs billions.
Companies can take steps to lower their exposure to Information Overload (an article about what can be done may be found at
http://www.basexblog.com/2009/04/23/lowering-your-information-overload-exposure/)
but even raising awareness of the problem and understanding the impact of overusing such tools as e-mail can make a big difference.
This Analyst Opinion is also available online at http://www.basexblog.com/2009/10/15/e-mail-reports-of-my-demise-are-premature/
Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex. He can be reached at jspira@basex.com
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