Buried in email?

Jethro73 writes "There is an article on Yahoo! about how Workers are mired in e-mail wasteland. They say employees waste an hour a day managing e-mail. This page at Cisco claims employees spend two hours per day, but cite a 15% increase in worker's productivity despite that." A few weeks ago I blew up my laptop and lost all my mail filters. When I got everything back up, I discovered that over 70% of my email is junk (compared to 25% after all my filters were in place). Filtering my mail is the only thing that makes reading my email possible. Well, that and ignoring any message complaining about Karma :)

Comments

Memo: Unnecessary E-mail

[L Fitzgerald Sjoberg]

We, the upper management of eSourceTec Inc., have discovered that employees have been wasting valuable time dealing with unnecessary e-mail. Here are the steps we are taking to eliminate this waste of time and energy:

1. All employees will be required to attend a series of company meetings on the subject of "Eliminating Unnecessary E-mail."

2. Following these meetings, employees will be required to attend department specific "E-Mail Task Force" meetings to come up with specific strategies for eliminating unnecessary e-mail.

3. Each day, employees will be required to send e-mail to their managers summarizing the amount and type of e-mail they have sent that day, flagging any e-mail exchanges that they feel could have been shortened or eliminated.

4. On a weekly basis, managers will have a one-on-one session with each employee in which they discuss how well e-mail strategies have been implemented, and what new strategies might be employed in the elimination of unnecessary e-mail.

We feel confident that these steps will drastically reduce the amount of time spent each day on pointless and unnecessary tasks, and lead our company into new strata of efficiency.

Regards,
D. R. Baskerville
Vice-President, Attention Allocation Resources

mail is great in the workplace

[unformed]

Having lots of mail is extremely useful on the job. For example, at my last job, my schedule would go like this:

12:00 Get to work (I have classes, so I was allowed to be late) drop my cds in my office, turn on my computer
12:15 Go on break with friends, recount last days events
12:45 Go back to office, check mail
1:15 Go on break, talk about email and office rumors
1:45 Go back to office and eat lunch
2:15 Cigarrette break
2:45 Reread mail to make sure I didn't miss anything
3:15 Look for work
3:30 Cigarrette break
3:45 Try to find a manager to get work to do
4:15 Found manager, got work
4:30 Break
4:45 Begin working
5:00 Leave unfinished work for tomorrow
5:15 Break
5:45 Relax
6:15 Read email sent today
6:45 Turn off computer
7:00 Break
7:45 Go home

If it wasn't for email, I would've had to actually work