A Giant Waste of Time, Part 1

(First in a random series on Business Time Wasters)

Email. 

If there was any greater curse ever cast over the workplace, I can’t think of one.

Sure, it facilitates communication. And none of us can even imagine anymore how we could function in a business environment without the ability to dash off a quick note to our team or manager with a question or a status, or forward on another message for review, or pass on a document almost instantly. At first, email seemed to be a great replacement for the memo–no typing, no copying, just instantaneous communication, with no paper to throw away or recycle.

That’s how they sold us all on it.

But the reality in most organizations is that it’s a giant black hole, sucking up everyone’s time.

You don’t believe me? Take off for a week, and on your first day back at the office, start sorting through all your email that’s accumulated. I guarantee you’ll be going through them until lunch. Maybe into the middle of the afternoon. Research from the McKinsey Global Institute shows that the average employee spends 11 hours per week—that’s 28% of their time, almost a full day-and-a-half, every week—managing their email. And that doesn’t count the time that’s lost from your employees changing gears and refocusing on their work before and after checking their email.

That’s probably time you’d rather they spend on something productive, I suspect. So how do you make email more efficient? See More...