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Moonsail Limited
Making Words Work For You |
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Email – Is It a Good Thing?
Can you remember life before email? What did we do when we needed to communicate with each other – either as individuals or as a group? Pick up the phone? Write a letter? Email has opened up a whole new world of quick, easy, and cheap communication. But has it been a victim of its own success?
Next time you check your email, try this experiment: time yourself and see how long you spend each day checking and responding to email. I’ve tried this myself this past week and been flabbergasted by the results. I’m actually repeating the experiment next week just to be sure I haven’t made a mistake. Because if I haven’t, then it’s clear I’m wasting a highly unacceptable amount of time responding to email in a purely reactive way.
Part of the problem stems from the fact that I have several email addresses to monitor.
This week, checking and responding to my daily messages has taken at least 2 hours + each and every day – including weekends – and it’s become obvious I’m wasting huge amounts of time dealing with this daily deluge of communication. 90% of it may well be useless, but still needs to be read just in case there IS something important buried there (as I found to my cost today – but that’s another story…).
I’m becoming increasingly buried under this pile of email which, if neglected for just one day, takes almost a full day’s worth of time to wade through. This can’t be right, surely? And I can’t help wondering: how did we manage BEFORE email ? How was all this communication channelled in days gone by – or didn’t we communicate as much? Or did we just communicate the important stuff to the right people instead of hitting the ‘Reply To All’ button?
www.businessinberkshire.co.uk/moonsail
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