According to a McKinsey analysis, the average professional spends 28% of their workday reading and responding to email. This equates to an astounding 2.6 hours per day spent and 120 messages received by the average full-time worker in America.
Here are five ways we waste time unnecessarily and how to reclaim it:
- Checking email excessively wastes 21 minutes per day
- Daily time loss of 27 minutes due to clogged inboxes
- 14 minutes per day are wasted by using folders to organize and find emails.
- Using a mouse to archive emails into multiple folders wastes 11 minutes per day.
- Each day, we spend eight minutes reading and processing irrelevant emails.
Email has become the bane of the twenty-first-century worker’s existence, but by implementing just these five practices, email can be restored to its former glory:
- Disable notifications and check your email hourly instead
- When you read an email for the first time, move it out of your inbox.
- Retrieve emails using the search functionality and search operators.
- Create two email folders and use shortcuts to archive emails in those folders.
- Avoid manually processing irrelevant or less important emails.