Email - the productivity Killer

31-38% is the proportion of time professionals spend on official emails every day. This amounts to 2.5-3.1 hours per day!!!

While emails are effective and maybe even essential to the corporate world, it is a double edged sword. They are arguably in the top two productivity diminishers (other is meetings) in organizations. Yet, we are so used to it that we don't appreciate the magnitude of the problem. Very few organizations consciously train their employees in better managing emails (or replacing them with other tools)! Imagine the productivity gains if we could get back even 50% of this unproductive time spent on emails.

Litmus test before you send an email
- Ask is it the right medium? For instance, if there is disagreement, emails will likely make the matter worse, but conversation could be more effective. Equally, emails may not be the best choice as a collaboration tool.
- Carefully curate who needs to be in the receiver fields 'to' vs 'cc' vs 'bcc'; marking the world is futile
- Does the email clearly have a call to action or is it just an update
- Does the subject convey the urgency & the topic (determines how fast you get a response)
- 'Right' level of detail
- Have you specified time when you expect the action/ reply