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Office Distracters

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by mike-r

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While not new to time and study people, Gartner made an interesting report regarding a tremendous office distracter: E-mails. Gartner estimates that on the average an employee spends approximately one hour daily reading, answering, and deleting E-mails (including the myriad corporate advertisements and corporate/personal SPAM). Due to the nature of my job, I find myself spending up to two hours daily involved with E-mail. It is not unusual for a correspondent to inquire, ?Didn?t you get my E-mail?? ?As if one walked around with a computer attached to their head (I think the WORLDCOM advertisement missed filming Kema (sp?) dropping into the open man-hole because he was more focused on global VPNs in his eyeglasses than where he was walking ). As Gartner pointed out, E-mails are as much a distracter as someone tapping on your shoulder or barging into your office while you are attempting to meet a deadline. What?s extremely sad is the break-down of our communication skills: it?snot unusual for two correspondents to rapid fire a set of ?snappy? E-mail retorts while being separated by the great distance of only one to two temporary walls.

5 replies

by dragon katie

Most anyone in my office knows I check my mail 4 times a day.
When I get in in the morning, about 10:30 after lunch and about 4:00. they can send as many as they like in the mean time but they know I wont take a look at it till those times. I can tell you how many mails I have that 20 minutes later have a oh never mind I figured out where it was/what it was/how to do it, not to mention the report requests that get more and more fine tuned as the couple of hours pass therefore eliminating a large number of revisions.
I have Microsoft outlook sort most of my mail into folders and it also sorts urgent (flagged) messages into one folder, so I know what to handle first, also if I find myself with a few spare moments in the day I can check that folder quickly and move on leaving all the other mail till one of the appointed times.

by nicknielsen

Always remember, however, that the high priority message is the _sender's_ high priority and that email is no substitute for personal attention.

As a service tech & trainer, I have to take into several items into account when I'm determining my work priorities:
1. IT & Training Policy
2. Relative importance of that job or project (determined by upper management!)
3. Other work in progress
4. All the other users.

In the end, the sender's high priority is very often NOT my high priority.

I do, of course, respond to request by email, but a quick verbal "I haven't forgotten you" on a regular (sometimes daily) basis will greatly reduce the number of increasingly frantic follow-ups to the first request.

by mike-r

I always need to evaluate E-mails regarding urgency--my perception. Senders of 'urgent' E-mails are given a personal phone call (or withing the same building, a personal visit) and resolution is quick.

by chrisw

Rules are a very helpful timesaver, if you email system supports it. You can send an automated reply to those individuals who keep bugging you about recieving their emails. If someone sends you and email with FYI in it, you can forward it to a FYIfolder to read at your leasure (ha! ha!). I have technical emails directed to individual folders for review. If I don't get to them, they get deleted. Depending on the email system, you should be able to create very complex rules to simplify yourlife.

I also agree that you should set the rules on how you work with your email. Let them know that you are not going to jump, every time they send you an email. If it is a priority item, then they can leave their cubicle and walk the 20 feet to talk to you about it.

Good luck!

by twhaight

What I get tired of is the 5-10 emails that get sent out by my company dealing with the charity dejour.

This week it is for March of Dimes. Every day I get several messages for some sort of food related event to raise money for it (a couple of weeks ago it was for Junior Achievement).

Thank goodness for the Rules function of Outlook that deletes this crap.

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