
01
May
Reduce email noise!
in All
Comments
Noise /(noun): (a) any sound that is undesired or interferes with one’s hearing of something; (b) an unwanted signal or a disturbance; (c) irrelevant or meaningless data or output occurring along with desired information
It won’t come as any surprise to hear that trying to keep up with email traffic makes it difficult for people to achieve their goals. In this article we consider some practical steps as well as some smart automation to help reduce email noise. It’s not only the obvious time spent on reading, composing or responding to emails (which McKinsey research concluded is around 28% of the working week on average – see our article on email collaboration software) but, according to a report from Loughborough University the situation is made worse by the fact that…
…the mean recovery time from an email interruption is 64 seconds, so with an average of 87 emails a day, employees spend up to 90 minutes a day – or 7.5 hours a week recovering from email interruptions.
Additionally, not only does email activity have an obvious direct link to productivity through time management, employee welfare is also at stake. A report from UCI/Microsoft Research/MIT confirmed the relationship whereby increasing the time that people spend on workday email leads to higher stress levels.
In other words… cutting down on email time will also improve the health and wellbeing of employees.
Research by the Radicati Group predicts that email will continue to grow with over 4.25bn users and 333bn daily emails expected in 2022. With this being the case, what can be done to mitigate this pressure? How can available time be maximised allowing the focus to instead be on those priorities that generate value for the organisation? The various measures can be divided into two groups, first a series of practical steps, and second those that make use of smart automation.

Practical first steps to consider

Batchers, Consistents or a mix of the two? Is it better to cluster email use in two or three hour periods – to batch them, use email consistently throughout the day – a constant flow – or find a happy medium between the two?
Choosing which of the two is best, or somewhere between the two, will depend on an individual user’s preferences. However, given the time taken to recover from each email interruption it will probably be most beneficial to set aside blocks of time during the day to handle important emails.
In order to reduce the prominence of interruptions turn off email sound alerts and new email dialogue boxes. Each new notification, whether it be on a mobile device or desktop, will not fail to cause a distraction.
Alternatively, some email applications allow a user to adjust email application settings to check for new messages every, say, 45 minutes. Although not strictly “batching” it does encourage dealing with messages together rather than individually, reducing the daily cumulative interruption recovery time. The problem is that for some industries, such as maritime, this solution is simply not feasible as things happen fast and users cannot fly blind for so long.
