The Hamster Revolution

The E-Mail Calculation

Technology now enables you to leave the office confident that clients can reach you with voice, text or e-mail messages if problems arise. That’s the good news. However, the bad news is that work-related e-mail has invaded people’s precious time away from the office. Don’t let this kind of e-mail spillage become a fact of your work life. Adopt strategies to change your e-mail and information-management habits, and to stay on top of the constant deluge of information.

Though e-mail doesn’t require postage, it’s not without its costs. Say you receive 50 e-mail messages a day and send 25, for a total of 75 messages per day. Multiply the total by 260, the number of days you probably work in a year. Subtracting holidays and vacation time gives you 240. So, if you send and receive 75 messages every work day, you deal with 18,000 messages per year. That’s without counting the messages to which you respond after hours and on weekends. You may be spending as much as one-third of your time on e-mail.

Before you begin to reduce your information overload, write down two goals, one personal and one professional. For example, do you want to take up a...