Ways to cut down on e-mail at work

I’ve whined about e-mails before, but I recently got some new ammunition, so I’m about to do it again.

In a piece last week by Elwin Green of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper, I learned that most people get 15 to 80 e-mails a day and that it only takes the average person about 15 e-mails to use up an hour of time at work.

So I can understand why Green’s source for the article, executive coach Martha Egan, believes that e-mail is a huge business expense.

She figures that it takes about 4 minutes to look at a single e-mail and then get back into whatever work you were doing when you stopped to check it.

That’s some serious computer time.

“E-mail has become the biggest interrupter of the universe,” Green said.

I couldn’t agree more.

I get between 300 to 400 a e-mails each day and I don’t spend anything like an hour on each group of 15. I read very few of them, choosing to scan the subject line instead and toss anything that seems irrelevant.

Usually I get 15 to 20 e-mails a day that I need to read carefully. But I do probably spend a couple hours a day sifting though the electronic pile.

That’s too much time. I need help.

And maybe you do, too.

For good advice, you can go to Egan’s Web site, www.inboxdetox.com.

Or I can give you a quick summary now.

Egan’s first recommendation is that you don’t allow a dinging or flashing computer or smart phone to make you immediately stop what you’re doing and check out the latest e-mail.

She suggests that you look at your e-mail at set times, say two to five times a day.

I’ve been doing that for some time now and it works pretty well.

Egan even suggests that you turn your e-mail off so that you’re not tempted to break your schedule. That doesn’t work for me because it’s my business to deal with important news quickly. I need to at least get a quick look at the message so I can decide whether I need to deal with it right away.

But shutting things down for at least part of the day might work for you.

Egan also suggests that people save far too much junk in their e-mail box.

Instead, she’d like you to sort your e-mails into those that need action, those to hold for reference and those to delete.

If your e-mail is crammed right now, she suggests you put everything in a temporary folder to clear out your inbox and find an hour here and there to whittle down the folder.

That’s not a bad idea.

Egan also urges members on work teams to stop using urgent signals on their e-mails. She suggests that if something is needed within three hours, you should call or visit the person.

That certainly fits if you plan on shutting down your e-mail for parts of the day so you can get some work done.

The other thing that I liked about Egan’s Web site was the link to Dudley Dawson’s 7 Habits of Highly Annoying E-mailers at http://tinyurl.com/emailers.

Dawson and I clearly share a distaste for the office e-mailers who use excessive smiley faces or feel the need to add cute clip art to their messages.

Mike Benbow: 425-339-3459; benbow@heraldnet.com.