How to Stop the Email Madness and Save a Boatload of Money!

There are literally billions of emails sent each day and many of them are simply not needed and result in “make work” projects. This is a huge productivity drain on your business!

According to a Washington Post article the average worker spends 4.1 hours per day doing email while this Forbes article suggests 2.5 hours a day per person for email!

If you have 50 staff working for you at an average cost of $50/hr and they are each wasting 2.5 hours a day on email, you are losing $6,250 dollars a day. This is $31,250 a week or $1,625,000 a year just because you don’t have better systems in place for business email!

So, what can you do about it?

Here are 12 tips that you can implement in your business to stop the email madness and reduce the flow of money down the drain!

Do You Suffer From Continuous Partial Attention Syndrome?

In today’s environment of continuous connectivity, we are literally bombarded with interruptions from the time we wake up until we go to bed. There are some of us who are even interrupted in our sleep as we cannot seem to disconnect from the online world. We get email alerts, news alerts, banking alerts, weather alerts, traffic alerts, investment alerts, text messages, instant messages, Facebook messages, RSS feed updates, LinkedIn updates, GroupOn alerts, meeting notices, phone calls, cellphone calls and on and on. It is actually quite amazing that we are able to function at all with this many distractions!

Linda Stone has coined a term for this state of perpetual interruption. She calls it “Continuous Partial Attention”. Essentially, all the interruptions throughout our days are resulting in very few moments where we are able to concentrate fully and deeply on the tasks at hand. This results in us living in a state of Continuous Partial Attention. We are rarely in an environment without something interrupting us every few minutes…even on an airplane (which is where I wrote this post) we have been interrupted approximately 5 times in the last 20 minutes with rather meaningless announcements by our well meaning flight attendants.