AUDIO: You’ve got too much mail!

READING, PA.
January 12, 2010 12:01am

Just ignore that ding. And that one. And all the others trying to get you to stop a project and check your e-mail. You’ll get more done and your company could see productivity jump, says Marsha Egan, a productivity expert.

“E-mail is an absolute blessing. It could be one of the best inventions of the 20th and 21st centuries,” says Ms. Egan, chief executive officer of The Egan Group Inc., of Reading, Pa., which advises companies large and small on ways to control the e-mail monster.

“But as with any great new technology, it can be misused and abused,” she says.

It’s those darn dings alerting you to incoming mail, sometimes at a rate of more than 100 a day for many businesspeople, she says.

“They allow the ‘unknown ding’ to interrupt what could be the most important thing they are working on,” she says.

Over the past decade, e-mail usage has surged to an almost incomprehensible 247 billion e-mails each day. Put another way, she says, e-mail users worldwide produce messages greater in size than over 16,000 copies of the complete works of Shakespeare -- each second!

“We have developed a dependency on e-mail that saps productivity,” says Ms. Egan. “Many people can’t keep up with their inbox and simply declare e-mail bankruptcy.”

(Marsha Egan talks about ways to break the e-mail addiction and clean out those inboxes in today’s CVBT Audio Interview. Please left-click on the link below to listen now or right-click to download the MP3 audio file for later listening. And here’s an idea: E-mail the URL of this story to a colleague.)

Ms. Egan is author of the book, “Inbox Detox and the Habit of E-Mail Excellence,” Acanthus 2009, as well as the e-books “Help! I’ve Fallen into My Inbox and Can’t Climb Out,” and “Reclaim Your Workplace Productivity.”

She’s calling for businesses to join in her third annual Clean Out Your Inbox Week, scheduled for the week of Jan. 25.

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