How much of your working day is spent checking and sending emails?
While you may not be able to put a figure on it, the chances are your emailing is taking up too much of your time – figures from The Guardian suggests nearly half (40%) of the working week is taken up dealing with internal emails that are of no real value to the business.
So tomorrow is the fifth annual global ‘No Email Day’, an awareness day aimed at making people more social, collaborative and social at work – but could you go a day without checking your inbox?
No Email Day
The first ever No Email Day took place on 11/11/2011, and although only about 300 people took part, it did raise awareness of the problem of unproductive work practices as the story was picked up by media big-hitters including: BBC Radio 5 Live, Wall Street Journal, Wired, Likehacker and The Sunday Times.
Not only that, IBM Benelux even launched their own social media campaign ‘Outside The Inbox‘ to coincide with No Email Day.
And while not everyone will be able to go the whole day without checking emails – the idea to bring work colleagues together to use their time more efficiently, not to bring down business – the main purpose of the campaign is to get people to look at how they communicate and consider if they could work a bit smarter.
So if, for instance, you send off several emails to colleague across the office floor, would it not make more sense to get up and talk to them instead – this will not only be more productive time-wise, it’s also a more social way to work, and is infinitely better for idea generation.
And if you’re getting people at other sites embroiled in time-consuming email chains, would it not be better to set up a teleconference instead? We certainly think it would.
So, will you be taking part in No Email Day tomorrow? If so, let us know…just don’t go emailing us, yeah?!
