When email became standard in the workforce in the early 1990s, inboxes received a modest amount of traffic, and you may have even been excited to hear “you’ve got mail!” That is rarely the case anymore. With literally hundreds of emails coming in each day, shifting through your inbox can be a time-wasting headache.
In fact, according to a recent McKinsey Global Institute study, the average person spends 13 hours per week on emails. That equates to almost 2 full days of work, 100 days each year and roughly 1/3 of our lives spent on email. Think of what you could do with all, or even half, of that time!
With mobile access now standard, many expect an email response within hours. A 2007 survey, showed Microsoft employees spent about 10 minutes responding to an email, and then took an additional 15 minutes to get back to work. This equates to about half an hour per email. No wonder we are wasting so much time in our inboxes!
You can get these hours back! Small changes can make a difference in your productivity.
- Check your email only twice a day – According to a recent Forbes article doing this alone can save you more than two hours a day.
- Categorize your email – Sift through your messages and mark them as “spam”, “to delete,” “for action now” or “for action later.” This will help shorten your response time, and make it faster for you to transition back to other tasks.
Stay tuned for more great time-saving tips to help increase your email productivity. In our next posts, we’ll explore daily habits to increase your productivity, how to protect your inbox from unwanted messages and how you can use Outlook to speed up your agency’s processes.
If you have an Outlook Integration option, your agency management system is a great tool for increased email productivity. Partner XE users with the Outlook integration module say it has helped increase their agency’s productivity and centralizes client info. This makes for a big win in the efficiency department!
To find out more about Partner XE’s Outlook integration, and its other great features, contact us at 800.747.9273 or [email protected].
