All of this back-and-forth switching ultimately hampers productivity by up to 40 percent. After each interruption, it takes an average of 23 minutes to get back to their original task. Employees already check their email as often as 36 times an hour. Tracking tasks through email also requires you to keep your email program running all day, opening the door for distractions. "This approach also makes managing your to-do-list problematic: When you need to quickly identify the right task to take on next, nothing slows you down like diving into your inbox to scroll through old messages." "If you're conflating email and task management, then the job of communicating - reading and replying to your messages - gets bogged down by all the emails you leave sitting in your inbox simply so you won't forget to address them," she wrote in Harvard Business Review. Mashing them together only makes both more cumbersome. It can work, sort of, but it's the wrong tool for the job.Īlthough inextricably linked, communication and task management are two separate things, argues researcher and author Alexandra Samuel. Using email as a task manager is like using a screwdriver to pound a nail. Related: How to Manage Time With 10 Tips That Work Why email makes a terrible task manager That means removing everything from the inbox that doesn't need to be there - starting with the to-do list. Unnecessary emails cost businesses an estimated $650 billion a year in productivity.Īs research increasingly demonstrates how email overload takes too much energy, erodes concentration and elevates stress levels at work, the writing on the wall is clear: companies that want to reclaim lost productivity need to reduce the email load, stat.As much as 80 percent of email traffic is "waste.".One in five knowledge workers cite email as their biggest time sink.Employees spend up to 40 percent of their time reading internal emails.
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