We are out of the Stone Age era when there were no technologies to assist us in our daily tasks and communications. Instead, now there are too many small-and-big tools and technologies, and everyone is using one or other. One such utility of daily use is our Email system, and believe it, or not almost all smart-phone users and business professionals use it or have one.
Over the years since its inception in 1971, email has gained a lot of popularity. It is one communication medium where you receive an email from your office, banks, travel agents, social media sites, blogs which you may have subscribed to, not to forget – junk emails, and SPAM (beware of these). An average office worker gets approximately 121 emails every day, amounting to more than 3 thousand emails in a month (all that when you consider yourself only an average receiver).
Let’s say that average time spent in checking one email is about 20 sec
then,
Approx. time spent checking emails in a month: 72600 sec or 20.1 hours (Considering you didn’t waste a single extra second reading those offers or never clicked on a link to browse some e-commerce sites)
Bazinga! Not many ever realize that.
As most of the emails in your office inbox are related to work, let’s not talk about that because rarely you can do anything about it, apart from better classification. Here, the point of concern is your primary inbox, yes, the one where you have been getting those credit cards or travel offers.
Statistics say that 49.7% of emails received in personal inboxes are Junk, and 3% are spam.
As we know, “too much of something is good for nothing”, the same applies to emails in our inbox.
Why should you take your email account seriously?
Apart from the above-illustrated need to save time that you are wasting every day in checking those un-necessary offers and discounts, there is an additional need for cleaning up that clutter.
Attention issues and lack of concentration: Your device (say, mobile) beeps a minimum of 2-3 times every hour, whenever a new email makes way to your inbox. Oh! Aren’t you getting enough of those beeps already from your blah-blah-blah social media accounts and the number of apps that you have on your phone? Well, beeps are not precisely the problem here, but it’s our intrinsic behavior of checking what the audio is for? “What did I just receive”, “it could be an important message”, “maybe some alert”, you say one of the many reasons to yourself and end-up checking your device within 10-15 min. of receiving that beep.
What just happened?
What just happened? You left some tasks to attend to the notification that in 50% of cases will be something not worth your attention. Studies prove that the time required to complete a job increases by almost around 25% if you have divided attention.
The first approach that I think most of the people can take is to “UNSUBSCRIBE” from un-necessary email lists. Go ahead and do that; it just takes a click (usually!). With every unsubscribe, you are saving a few minutes of your monthly time. The lesser clutter you receive, the better for you. Recently, I did the same to my inbox and ended up removing myself from around 20-25 email groups. Luckily, I have to spend considerably lesser time now while going through my inbox.
Remember that this is not a once in a lifetime activity, ideally, you should un-clutter your inbox every half-yearly or so because that’s the time to which you would have subscribed to a multitude of other sites.
Source: http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Email-Statistics-Report-2015-2019-Executive-Summary.pdf