Once upon a time email was hailed a saviour to office productivity, offering easy and fast communication with colleagues and customers. These days however the story is a little different. It seems some people get so stressed by email, believing that all emails must be replied to straight away, productivity within their primary role actually decreases. Studies have shown that on an average day, an employee sends around 37 emails per day. Now I remember my days at a large Texas based IT outsourcing company, I would generally receive between 100-200 emails per day. The difference with me however is that I had a very relaxed philosophy when dealing with emails and often, well, didn’t deal with them. If I was to reply to them all, I certainly wouldn’t have got any work done, but I required long periods of concentration and everyone understood that. Therefore, I can understand that having no-email days, and Intel are one of the latest companies to introduce this, to encourage actually speaking to one another could very well be a turn for the better. It is interesting to see that how over just a decade, a technology once regarded as a revolution as important as the invention of computers themselves, can become so relied upon that it actually starts to become a hindrance.

Do any of you work for a company which has introduced similar schemes? Do you often feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of email received, and the expectations of every sender to receive a response straight away? Let me know!.

Tags: email, work productivity