I'm going to give you 30 mins back in your day, every day !

Ant Morse
May 26, 2019
2 min read

Updated: Mar 15, 2020

Email is not efficient - FACT !

Would you like 30 mins back in your day? Then take just a couple of mins to read this.

Let me guess, you spend a massive amount of your day just trying to manage your inbox..and never really keep up? Yeah, me too.

‘This year(2019) businesses and consumers will send over 293 billion emails per day, and this is forecast to grow to over 347 billion by year-end 2023’ (globally)

Ask yourself these questions

How many emails do you receive every day? 20, 50, 100…more 😵
How many are you just cc’ed on ? 🤔
How many are part of a long chain you struggled to follow? 🤕
How many look like an essay and you gave up to ‘read it later’? 🧐
How long did it take you just to catch up on your inbox today, oh sorry you didn’t manage to, did you, me neither 😢

The reality is Email is completely inefficient, fact!

We are spending more time managing email than actually using it to be productive or creative.

Email has also become a tool to pass responsibility of actions or tasks and due to the lack actual discussion these generates a huge chain of chuckle brothers 'to me, to you' action delegation.

Here’s the steps to your 30 mins back.

Set a rule to Auto file all emails you are cc’ed on. If they wanted you to respond they would send to you directly.
Think before you send or reply to your next email. Do I need to respond? Then ask the question, would a call be better, or could we do this better/quicker on IM or by moving the project /conversation into Microsoft Teams
Look at the cc list and challenge it, does everyone on there really need to be on this? then remove as required in your reply
Set an out of office to set expectations of when you will be replying to emails! Chose an hour or even a day of the week in your response. Email is not IM, don’t feel you have to reply straight away. Treat it like a posted letter and expect the delay, both ways
Set a spam filter up. You have never, nor will ever buy anything from spam email nor will you ever.
Next time you go on leave, set an Out Of Office advising people that you will not be picking up emails and that if urgent they should resend their email for the day of your return.
Next time you return from leave delete all new mails as based on the above rule, if it was actually important they will clog up your inbox again in the near future to remind you.