sanebox:

Email isn’t going anywhere

With over 3 billion email accounts word wide and just under 300 billion messages sent each day, email is one of the most popular and widely used forms of communication today.

Although email is a fast, easy, and inexpensive form of communication , it is tainted with incredible inefficiencies. The reason for this is largely due to lack of knowledge surrounding email etiquette. People have become lazy with how they interact and engage with email, which results in massive amounts of wasted time.

Every industry is hurt by poor email habits and etiquette. Whether you’re a real estate agent, lawyer, doctor, entrepreneur, teacher or any other professional your productivity has been crippled by how you and your colleagues interact and process email.

Constant interruptions kill productivity

Our ability as humans to concentrate is severely impacted by constant interruptions. Focusing on any task, no matter the complexity is difficult while constantly being interrupted by emails. A case study conducted by the Danwood Group found it takes 1.5 minutes on average to read and recover from an email. The Danwood Group case study provides a very insightful example of this dilemma and it is as follows:

Lets say an employee is alerted every 5 minutes when they receive new mail, which means there’s potential for 96 interruptions in a regular 8-hour workday. If it takes 1.5 minutes to read and recover from an email this leaves 3.5 minutes until the employee is interrupted again. Now lets say this same employee changes the alert to go off every 45 minutes instead of 5, this means interruptions decrease to 11 per day. If 9 emails accumulated over 45 minutes it will take 6 minutes on average to read and recover from the interruption, which leaves 39 minutes until the next interruption.

Fixing The Problem

Each and every industry experiences email overload to a certain degree and it’s imperative that companies and individuals implement systems and good habits surrounding email to combat it as much as possible. Services like SaneBox are especially attractive to professionals in fields that require large amounts of communication such as Real Estate. There are lots of great email services out there, but the most important thing to remember when processing email is to set specific times to check email and to not allow yourself to get distracted by unimportant emails. SaneBox, for instance, helps real estate agents and other professionals prioritize their emails automatically by sending non-urgent, unimportant emails to a sub folder where they can process these emails in bulk much more efficiently and effectively at their leisure.

Email has become such a problem recently, because people have acquired bad habits in the way they process and deal with email in general. Like we all know, bad habits are hard to break, but if you are conscious of your interactions with email these bad habits will become more and more obvious and solutions will present themselves. Becoming an effective emailer will save you substantial amounts of time, so read up on new strategies and helpful pointers as often as possible and implement what you learn, figure out what works and cut what doesn’t.