Hi, my name is Brett. And I have a serious email problem.
I just learned that I spend a quarter of my working hours staring at my Inbox.
You may be wondering – how is that even possible? Brett, what are you – braindead?!
Sadly…I may be. Here’s the shocking proof – captured by Chrometa itself:
Note that in this sample, I have 37 hours of active time (so that does not count phone or meeting time – only active time on my PC). This was recorded over a 2+ week span.
Due to product testing and such, Chrometa was not running all of the time (though my co-workers may scoff and say that I’m busted for putting in 20 hour weeks!)
AND here’s the really sad part – individual emails are recorded separately, by their subject line, and are therefore not even included in this massive number!
So the 8+ hour entry under Microsoft Outlook – Inbox is solely due to time that I spent looking at Outlook, without an individual email open. There are a limited number of things I could have been doing, and none of them are particularly productive:
- Checking for new email
- Reading an email through the preview pane
- Looking at my calendar
I’d like to look at the bright side of this finding. Like you, I often consider myself way too busy to get everything done that I’d like to. So in a sense, this underperformance is a good thing, as there’s a lot of room for improvement!
In fact, I know that productivity experts often assert that any time you waste is not limited that time itself, but also encompasses the “switching cost” of diverting your focus. So if my Inbox time is in fact due to obsessively checking for new email, then I’m losing a lot more time than is even displayed here!
Since it is a new year, and a new decade to boot, it’s a perfect time to look at this area as some real “low hanging fruit” for improving productivity. It’s safe to say that checking email every 5-10 minutes is a disastrous approach – but what is the right approach?
Personally I’m used to being on the “front lines” from a sales and support standpoint, so a once or twice a day checking of email wouldn’t suffice. But what would the optimal frequency be? Every hour? Longer? Shorter?
What email best practices would you recommend?
Oh I just played this game. I had the same issue w/ another time management software and eventually just gave up. But just today I gave it another go and think I have the issue licked.
For me the problem is the preview pane. (Sorry, I’m not giving it up. Double clicking each email to read it… not gonna happen.)
So what I did today was setup a number of rules to put things into folders when they come in. Grant it, that’s a lot of folders, but subfolders help and my rules are pretty elaborate. (I had them setup anyway to ‘categorize’ mail, but now I made it move the mail too.)
I put the top 5 clients I have going on and a shortcut to the inbox (in case my rules don’t catch something) in my favorites. And I also have search folder for all received mail.
Then when email comes in, I’m forced to click on the folder it was moved to, to preview it. When I do that the window title changes to the folder name. Which is enough for my purposes. (1 folder per client)
Plus because I really don’t like folders for email, I just do it to get the name in the window title… the Search folder of all received mail is handy for just double checking the day, and making sure I addressed everything that came in. It’s essentially what my inbox used to look like. (But I can’t really work out of that, since I’d lose track of my time in there, it’s just in case I need it.)
Ok it’s only day 1, but I used this system all day successfully
Oh and maybe this is the key to my success so far
but there is no separate ‘checking for email’ task in my world. Outlook’s always running. It’s on its own monitor (along w/ skype and onenote). I do my main work on the other 2 monitors.
I think you need another monitor.. I recommend 3
Also if you were checking your calendar, the window title would have changed. So you must have been previewing email for all that outlook time…or napping.
Thanks Jenny
Probably will finally make the leap on the 2nd monitor…I had been thinking it’d be a hindrance, but obviously it can’t get much worse for me from here 
Cool to hear on the folder system, that’s a good way to do it! I’m trying to be more diligent in applying rules…have found batching similar emails to be a huge time saver.