According to McKinsey, on average, people spend 28% of their workday reading and responding to email. It turns out that if an employee works full-time, he or she gets 120 emails a day, and all he or she does is sort through mail for 2.6 hours. If a student spends half a day on write paper and homework, he spends several hours answering emails to teachers and his classmates. In most cases, people resort to one of two extreme ways of dealing with the flow of emails. Some believe sacredly that there should be no unread messages in the mailbox and force themselves to keep it that way. Others give up and let the mail pile up. Then there are those who prefer a more moderate approach to these two extremes: they simply check their mail less often.
We developed time management techniques and decided to see if there was any scientifically backed way to spend less than 2.6 hours a day on mail and not lose efficiency. The results surprised us: it turns out that you can save more than half of that time, namely 81 minutes a day, if you give up five bad habits.
Stop endlessly checking email and save 21 minutes
People check email on average 15 times a day, that is, every 37 minutes. But most interlocutors don’t expect to be answered that quickly. About 40 percent of work correspondence participants expect an answer within an hour, and only 11 percent of customers and 8 percent of colleagues want to be answered faster. If you go to your mailbox once an hour instead of every 37 minutes, you’ll save yourself six extra inbox checks a day. What would that lead to? Some researchers claim that it takes up to 23 minutes and 15 seconds for a person to get back to work at the same pace after any interruption, including going to the mailbox. We don’t question such conclusions, but for this article we used a more conservative study from Loughborough University that says it takes 64 seconds to regain productivity after a break from work.
Constantly looking in the mailbox isn’t the only problem. Many people read all the notifications that appear in the corner of the monitor every time an email arrives, thereby losing another few seconds at a time. According to researcher Sophie Leroy of the University of Washington, we pay a price for interruptions in quality: “When we think about one task and do another, both suffer because we don’t have the cognitive ability to do two tasks at the same time.”
Check your email six times too many, get distracted by notifications and struggle to get back to work – and you’ve already lost 21 minutes in a day. Fixing the situation, however, is simple. Turn off notifications and set aside 5-8 minutes per hour to check your email. Of course, for some professions this solution is just not suitable. There are those who are used to responding within minutes because it gives a sense of control. But in most cases, responding instantly isn’t necessary at all.
Clear your inbox and save 27 minutes
They say there’s no point in moving emails out of your inbox anymore, because modern email services make it easy to find any email among hundreds or even thousands of others. But that’s not entirely true. The search function is really the fastest way to find old emails. But if we don’t remove them from our inbox, we still lose time. Going into overflowing Inboxes, we inevitably re-read old emails. There’s nothing we can do about it: if there are emails, a person will read them. The average employee has more than 200 letters in his inbox. He receives 120 new emails a day, but he reads only a quarter of them.
Without a clear plan of action, the emails will continue to pile up. Let’s imagine that a person checks his mail 15 times a day. Even if he reads only the introductory part and runs his eyes over only those letters which are immediately visible on the computer screen, he will reread on average 10% of the letters in his inbox and spend four seconds on each one. That’s a total of 27 wasted minutes every day.
But the problem can be solved very easily: always either archive or delete the mail immediately after reading it. This method is not good for emails that require a delayed reply. But such a letter does not need to be reread again. This is now a pressing task, so the letter should be moved from the inbox to the to-do list.
If you have never archived letters before, you will save not 27, but 22 minutes of your working time the first time, because you will have to allocate 5 minutes per day for archiving to clear your mail.
Don’t waste time putting emails in folders and save 14 minutes
Thirty-seven percent of the time, people don’t respond right away, but put off responding to an email. For this reason, searching for emails that have already been read accounts for a significant portion of the work with email. People usually create folders for different topics, people and types of messages and archive each new email in the appropriate folder to speed up the search. The average office worker creates a new folder every five days and uses a total of 37 folders. But finding the right email in a folder is 9% slower than a keyword search, and 50% slower than a command search.
Now that you know how to search for emails more efficiently, it’s time to make the connection between your email and your to-do list. Forward your emails to a separate email address, set up to automatically convert them to tasks. Another option is to add a simplified version of the to-do list application to your email client, where you will put the letters-tasks.
Together, the steps listed in this paragraph will save you 14 minutes a day.
Don’t manually archive emails into separate folders and save 11 minutes
A stack of 37 folders, usually located on the left side of your email client, not only slows down retrieval. Roughly 10 percent of the total time people spend on email is spent sorting through the right emails. This process consists of two steps: first, the person decides where to move the email and then manually moves it.
We’ve already realized that folders are not necessary for retrieving emails. So is it worth having them at all? Most people need exactly two folders: for read mails which require further action (let’s call this folder “Archive”) and for mails which can be read later (“To read”). We cannot do without folders at all: you need at least one folder to move messages from incoming messages to it.
To calculate how many minutes you can save if you refuse from 37 folders in favor of two, we use Hick’s law, a psychological principle that describes the mathematical relation between the number of choices and the time of making a decision. According to it, the choice of 37 options is given to a person five times slower than the choice of two options.
Mail sorting can be made even more efficient by using automatic rules and filters. They eliminate the chance that you will accidentally put your mail in the wrong place. It’s better to use “hot keys” rather than manually using the mouse: it’s twice as fast. For example, the combination Ctrl + Shift + V in Outlook allows you to move an item to the selected folder. Users can set their own commands to save time by moving emails with one key, like in G Suite, where you just have to press V.
Stop reading and pondering unnecessary emails and save 8 minutes
According to Sanebox, 62 percent of emails are junk that you can get rid of at once. On average people read 20% of all newsletters which come to them and spend 15-20 seconds for each one, and as a result they lose four minutes every day. Even deleting one unnecessary email takes time (about 3.2 seconds), and in just one day it adds up to three minutes. Instead of getting rid of junk email on a daily basis, simply unsubscribe from newsletters or block unwanted emails.
To stop reading unnecessary emails, first enable automatic filtering for the newsletters you need, second, unsubscribe from unnecessary ones, and third, block all spam that will continue to arrive after unsubscribing.
Email has become the bane of the 21st century for working people. However, we’re only five steps away from using email productively:
1.Turn off notifications and check your mail once an hour.
2.Move all emails from your inbox as soon as you read them.
3.Use search commands to find old emails.
4.Have just two folders and archive emails in them using hotkeys.
5.Don’t waste time on unnecessary and not particularly important emails.
It’s time to let go of habits and instincts and trust research. This will help you regain lost time and finally take control of your emails.
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