Email overload

Jeremy Zawodny talks about email overload, something own of the owners at the company here was talking to me about over dinner recently, and something we have posted about before recently.

For "very important people", email is getting to be a less and less reliable way of reaching someone. In terms of Bill Gates (and countless other top execs I'm sure), they have their own staff to manage their email for them.
If you feel that you are getting too much email to get through in a timely fashion, it is worthwhile to sit down and do some napkin calculations to estimate how long you spend dealing with each email (time to read, time to make a decision, time to act on that decision, time to reply, etc). Then multiply the average time spent on each email times how many new messages you get everyday. If that exceeds the amount of time which you can afford to spend on email, then you might want to reevaluate the importance of email in your life.
In the case of Bill Gates - he effectively makes so much per minute that it is cheaper for him to have a staff of people to work on it for him instead.
You might not be able to afford the staff, so it might make more sense for you to just spend less time on email and miss a few (or a bunch).

In the case of Bill Gates, he is likely getting people who want to ask him questions or get face time with him. In the case of others, like my wife, they get flooded with newsletters. In my own case I find that email is less of the issue and RSS feeds are my downfall.
If newletters are the case for you, then perhaps you need to reduce the number of them which you get (or at least the number which you actually read).

If you have your own suggestions for dealing with the information overload, post them up - we are all ears.

Posted by Eric at March 12, 2005 01:27 PM | TrackBack