Email is the leading cause of preventable productivity loss in organizations today. Forbes Magazine (2008) Employees spend 1 to 3 or more hours per day managing email at 40-60% of capacity. That means they typically lose 30-60 minutes PER DAY. Not some. All — even the ones who believe they are extremely productive. That means…
It all started with a client. To begin with, his IT manager had told him that 92% of his incoming email was spam and was filtered out before it ever reached his inbox. So my client never saw more than ninety percent of his incoming volume. What my client found even more astonishing was that…
One of your prime objectives as a sales director is to get your teams out of their inbox and in front of the customer as much as possible. I’m not knocking the importance of email, I’m just saying that you probably see a huge benefit to having your teams managing their inboxes at twice their…
I’ve seen Hector (not his real name) wheeling his cart around Barcelona a few times. It’s massive. It must be extremely difficult to maneuver. One day I went up to him asked him if he really needed all of those things. He actually articulated an impressive defense. Does that remind you of anyone you know?…
I have this weird habit, one might think. Before I click send on a mail that contains a document that I have attached, I open the document and check it one last time. Even if I have already gone through the document, or have just created it, I open it once it is attached to…
OK, I have a small company of only 200 employees, so $3.2 million is nothing. But imagine a company of 2,000 employees that spend 2 hrs. per day on email with an average annual salary of $70,000. That would mean that they spend OVER HALF A MILLION DOLLARS PER DAY managing email. Since we…
Not so long ago, Sony Corp. in the US was hacked. I am sure you’ve heard about the case (it was eventually blamed on North Korea, though security experts are questioning that conclusion). My favorite tech-magazine has this interesting article on the subject: The importance of deleting old stuff, another lesson from the Sony attack…
There’s a horde of startups trying to replace email. Some of these apps, like Slack (which we use at Business Insider), take a chat-room approach. There are enterprise messaging apps that work like Snapchat, like Cotap and TigerText. Some mobile-first productivity apps like Quip imagine that we’ll communicate directly in the documents we’re working on….
I just read an article by a very smart man, Nathan Zeldes, who believes that we need a benchmark for email classifier performance. In other words, some way of gaging how well auto-prioritization Maybe. Maybe not. It seems that most email apps these days are looking for this algorithm as if it were the Holy…
How quickly we respond to a message (email, phone, sms, chat, etc.) is an often misunderstood function of our work and is further complicated by leaders who institute temporal rules like “within one business day” or in less than two hours. Here is a partial list guidelines regarding responsiveness: 1. Responses are not mandatory. You…