Inundation of electronic messages becomes drain on productivity
By Kevin Smith, Staff Writer@ Pasadena Star-News, October 16, 2010
Anyone who has ever gone into the office and plowed through the day's work without interruption knows that's the exception to the rule.
Let's face it, most days we're lucky to go a half hour without getting multiple e-mails, phone calls, faxes or internal messages - all of which distract us from the work we're trying to complete.
A report by Xerox Corp. and Harris Interactive reveals that 58 percent of U.S. government and education workers spend nearly half their workday filing, deleting or sorting paper or digital information.
And it doesn't end there.
Seventy-two percent of Americans say they check e-mails in bed, on sick days and during vacation, according to Xobni, a San Francisco-based company that offers organizational strategies for handling e-mails.
Americans are working longer and harder. And in many cases, they're getting less done.
"When we don't establish the right habits, we become powerless to digital distractions and interruptions," said Marsha Egan, an internationally recognized authority and certified coach on dealing with digital overwhelm. "As statistics show, the results on productivity can be catastrophic."
And costly. Basex, an IT research and consulting firm, said the U.S. economy loses about $900 billion a year in productivity because of information overload.
Wednesday has been designated as "Information Overload Awareness Day."
Egan, CEO of professional coaching firm The Egan Group, has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and New York Post as well as on CBS News, ABC News, National Public Radio and Fox News, among other media outlets.
Egan noted that an average working person gets about 96 e-mails a day.
That's about 10 to 12 an hour," she said. "That doesn't sound like much, but it interrupts what you're doing, and it takes the average person four minutes to recover from an interruption."
Egan's advice may seem brutal to e-mail addicts - but here's how it works:
"Start with the low-hanging fruit," she said. "Just check your e-mail five times a day - first thing in the morning, mid-morning, after lunch, mid-afternoon and about 20 before the end of the day. This allows you about 90 minutes of time to do other stuff without being interrupted. Otherwise, you'll be dealing with this recovery time all day long."
Egan also advises workers to approach their e-mail in a systematic fashion. Go into the imbeds with the intention of sorting, not working, she says.
"You can take the important ones and triage them into a folder where you can get at them later," she said. "But if there are e-mails you can handle in two minutes or less, handle them."
Gary Kaplan, president of Gary Kaplan & Associates, a Pasadena-based executive search firm, said employees in today's workplace are fielding more information than ever.
"In spite of spam filters, people are getting in inordinate amount of e-mail," he said. "I get large numbers of unsolicited resumes. And in many cases they're coming from people who don't even want to work in this area."
Kaplan said he routinely gets a barrage of e-mails pertaining to everything from seminars and webinars to books, industry reports and virtually everything else you could think of.
And employees have to handle it themselves.
"I cleared out my e-mail last night at nine o'clock and when I came in this morning it was filled up again," he said. "And most of it is stuff I don't need."
Isaac Garcia, CEO and co-founder of Central Desktop, a Web-based collaboration software firm, said information is coming at workers faster than ever these days.
"It's exponentially getting faster," he said. "And tools like Facebook and Twitter are increasing the number of firehoses that are flying at you at any given time."
Central Desktop allows employees to share and manage projects by collaborating with others inside or outside their company.
"It creates a more efficient way," Garcia said. "Our product consolidates the work into a single area where it's not all coming at you via e-mail. It also gives you a place to store documents that you can access from anywhere."
