By Ashley Snodgrass, Executive Account Manager
I spend a lot of time in my email inbox. Reading, replying, forwarding, sorting, unsubscribing. Repeating. Over, and over, and over again. A weird measure of time I keep is how many messages have sent. If you work in Outlook for Desktop, you can head on over to your Sent folder, and see the number at the bottom of your screen. I’ve sent… a lot of emails. I’m not going to tell you how many, for fear that I’ll be exposed; either because you think I should send way more, or you think I should send way, way less.
The average office worker sends and receives an average 122 emails a day. How many times do we do something 122 times in a single workday? Thinking of any other business operation, if a company asked an employee to do something 122 times, the company would monitor and measure that task extensively to ensure employees were approaching the repetitive task the most efficient way. Yet, why is this not the case with email?
I’ve been inspired by Seth Godin’s recent blog post about “The Weight of Repetitive Tasks”. Seth Godin compares digital tasks to laying bricks – a motion that we repeat numerous times. Yet, as the bricklayers in Seth Godin’s post demonstrate, if you take the time to get your workflow right, you can “avoid paying a penalty for poor digital hygiene every single day.” What are the things in your workday that are repetitive, but that you have not taken the time to address? Once you identify the bricks you’re moving, you can better solve for the most effective way to build the brick wall.
