August 17, 2007
Following his highly successful post on out-of-office e-mail replies, Guru has been inundated with requests for more top tips on managing e-mails.
So a press release on the subject from Global Integration couldn't have been more timely.
It reads:
600 e-mails waiting for you when you get back from holiday? Delete the lot!New research conducted by teams of academics from Glasgow has identified an all too familiar problem now commonplace among office workers: e-mail stress. The researchers' study found that 34% of people feel 'e-stressed' by the sheer volume of e-mails they receive.
These findings come as no surprise to Global Integration, whose own survey has identified that people get an average of 58 e-mails per day. So a typical person will return from a two-week holiday to find nearly 600 e-mails waiting for them.
Of these, only 43% are necessary for them to do their job, meaning that staff can spend up to 20% of their time dealing with unnecessary e-mails.
Kevan Hall, CEO of Global Integration and author of Speed Lead: Faster, Simpler Ways to Manage People, Projects and Teams in Complex Companies, believes that dealing with the e-mails is counterproductive in terms of managing time, not to mention well-being.
His solution is quite simple: delete the lot, he advises, adding that 99% of them will have solved themselves whilst you were away and the urgent ones will contact you again anyway.
Guru salutes this approach to communication, as he recently returned to work from a week's holiday to find his "inbox full" of 300+ mostly irrelevant e-mails (though there was a potentially very interesting one from a Nigerian prince who wants help transferring £350m into a UK bank and is offering a generous reward of 20% in exchange for Guru's account details).
Guru's fellow Personnel Today blogger HR Hartley at HaRRgh! has also just posted about the phenomenon.
That said, it's a good thing for the PR people at Global Integration that Guru didn't follow Kevan Hall's advice to delete all his e-mails without checking them on this occasion, as its press release had been sent to Yours Truly... by e-mail!
