If you are like most people, you check email multiple times a day.
Have you ever tracked how much time you spend checking email every day? Just for kicks, try keeping a log for just one week – the results may surprise you!
Email is now arguably the most important communication tool for most businesses. In the average office, employees receive between 60 and 100 emails per day.
In my experience, as your responsibilities in the company increase, so do the number of emails you receive, both direct and the ones you’re cc’ed on. It can get overwhelming, trying to read, understand and respond to each email, which is why so many of us end up with thousands of emails piling up in our Inbox over the course of a few months.
It should come as no surprise that most people are now in the habit of checking their email multiple times a day, and have been for years. An analysis by McKinsey & Company found that a typical professional spends 28% of their work day managing email.
Adobe conducted its own survey of over a thousand office worker in the US and found that they typically spent 2.5 hours on personal email plus an additional 3.1 hours on work email. That is a staggering 5.6 hours of email per day.
And these surveys are from 2018 and 2019 … that’s before the last 2 years of lockdowns and work from home around the world.
Given the ongoing WFH phenomenon, it’s reasonable to assume that we’re now spending even more time on email each day. And those hours add up!
If you are like most people, it’s not just the time spent checking and responding to email, but also the lost productivity because you have to get back into whatever it was you were doing before you checked email. Productivity experts estimate that it takes about 25 minutes to refocus and get into the flow when interrupted.
Now multiply that by the number of times you check email during the work day: that’s a huge chunk of time in terms of lost productivity for you and your colleagues!
Those studies are, of course, focused on employees, and on the impact on productivity of spending so much time handling email every day. But what about the impact on you as an entrepreneur?
Being the business owner, you probably feel intense pressure to be super responsive to client emails. It’s easy to get dragged into long email conversations and, before you know it, it’s time to be wrapping up for the day.
As an entrepreneur, you are your own boss and your only task is to run your company as efficiently as possible.
Of course, unlike most office workers, you don’t have a boss who keeps track of your time. On the flip side, without a boss to tell you what to do, it is entirely your responsibility to make sure your business is running smoothly.
Email is certainly a prime way to make sure your business runs smoothly. But staying on top of your email, especially when you are small, means you are also constantly interrupted from other things you could be doing to help your company grow.
You spend more time on email because it feels like the easiest and quickest way you can be productive with your time right now. But distractions don’t just mean we spend less time on our actual work tasks, they also result in us spending less time in developing relationships with our coworkers and clients—two things that can be instrumental in helping us run our businesses more effectively.
Being constantly interrupted by email also leads to our cognitive capacity being reduced over time because we never get a full mental break from email.
And of course, the more time you spend “at work”, whether checking email or handling the other tasks that got delayed because you were busy with email, the less time you have to spend time with family and friends. Work/life balance is something we talk about all the time, but how do we actually make more time for the things that are important to us?
The easiest way to regain control of your email is to become picky about when you check email: the 2.5 hours a day mentioned above are largely wasted time because most of us check email far too often during the day. Here are a few other things you can do to reduce your email clutter and boost your productivity:
- Set boundaries with employees and clients: set the expectation that you will respond to any communication within 24 hours Set up similar limits for yourself: instead of automatically checking email every time you get distracted, only check email once or twice a day
- Follow a one-touch policy: handle any email as soon as you read it. Just like with snail mail, it is easiest to make that decision the very first time you read it.
- If it’s important and/or urgent and needs your input, reply to it immediately and cc someone else who can take over the communication after the initial response.
- If it can be handled by someone else, delegate it.
- If it’s neither important nor urgent, delete it (and preferably, unsubscribe if it’s from a mailing list or newsletter that is no longer relevant to you).
There are other things that can help, too, such as setting up filters to automatically mark certain emails as important (emails from your biggest client, for example), or to filter out routine emails and either archive them or forward them to someone else who can handle them.
These simple tips will help you regain control over both your email inbox (inbox-zero is much easier to achieve when you’re not saving things up to read later!) but also over your time. With a good system in place, you may actually wind up saving time and getting more done each day because you are not spending time on extending and responding to emails that can be handled in a couple of sentences or automated, reducing the time you have to spend with each email.
And in the long run, that means you will have more time for the things you love most about your work – developing relationships with your coworkers and clients, working on your company’s next big idea, spending time with friends and family!