What Is Email Inefficiency Costing You?

The consequence of continuous connectivity

Of course, the internet and email are great. Things are possible now that were hard to imagine just a few years ago. I would be the last person to contradict this; the fact is that it is only possible to run our business out of Spain because of email and internet.

With smart phones and tablets, you can send and receive whatever you want to and from whoever you want, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. So we do.

There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want. – Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes)

However, this 24/7/365 connectivity has another side to it. We never actually learned how to deal with such an enormous amount of information. There is no subject at school or university that deals with prioritising information, that teaches us which tools to use for which type of communication, or that shows us how to answer an email that has been upsetting us for two hours (here’s a clue: you don’t answer it).

What about the emotional effect of email? The fact that you can check your email at every moment of the day doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Almost 25% of the working population check their email just before going to sleep. Happy dreaming (or, rather, happy sex life).

And finally, the costs are enormous. Wasting just 60 minutes a day on the inefficiencies of email, such as reading long messages with an unclear action for you at the bottom, or deciphering an FYI mail only to find out that there is no added value for you, or simply deciding if you can delete a message, costs you valuable time and money.

What is email overload costing you?

Let’s have a look at your situation. How much time, on average, do you lose each day due to email and information overload? Be sure to include time you spend on:

  • Dealing with being Cc’d or Bcc’d on a dozen messages and trying to figure out why
  • Using email when voice or in-person would be faster
  • Sending or receiving messages sent for ‘butt-covering’ reasons
  • Decoding ambiguous, incomplete, or vague emails from someone in power
  • Scanning and reading emails that turn out to be irrelevant
  • ‘Multi-tasking’ because each email shoves you into a different train of thought
  • Just calming down and re-centering from the anxiety of having a huge inbox backlog

Average time wasted on the above per day: ____ minutes (A)

Your annual salary: ___________ € / $ / £ / ¥ / … (B)

Working days per year: ____ days (C)

Working hours per day: ____ hours (D)

Total working days wasted per year: (A * C) / (D * 60)

Total value of yearly wasted time: (A * B) / (D * 60)

So, if you spend on average 60 minutes per day on all the inefficiencies of email (which is a low estimate), and you work 220 days per year for about 10 hours per day, with an annual salary of 100,000 Euros, you waste around 22 working days every year, which represents a value of 10,000 Euros.

Even if you’re not so concerned about the wasted value, for me the loss of time is always staggering. What else could you do with 22 days?

Multiply these outcomes with the amount of employees in your company, and decide if this is something worthwhile to take action on.

No excuse

Nowadays, we accept the myth that email overload is part of our jobs and that we have to live with it. That it’s a struggle and that there is no sustainable solution other than doing our best to keep it under control. And that the only thing we can do is to complain about it.

But that’s a mistake.

There is no excuse for you not to master your inbox. There is no excuse for you not to know how to deal with all your emails. Being in control of your inbox and information flow is a management skill, just like knowing how to use Word, Excel or PowerPoint. In today’s business world you cannot walk away from it. (Well, of course you can, but at what price?)

The higher your position in an organisation, or the more influence you have on a group of people, the more important it becomes to master your inbox. People copy their leaders’ behaviour. Especially in times of stress. If you constantly send urgent emails, you distract your people from what they’re doing. If you require a Cc on every email conversation that passes by, you train people not to make decisions themselves. And if you send emails with people in Bcc, you stimulate a political environment of distrust and suspicion.

And that’s not what you’re up to, are you?