In business, time, as the saying goes, is money. Today’s businesspeople are spending increasing amounts of time simply keeping up with the huge bulk of email that descends into their mailboxes each and every day. While modern spam-screening features and junkmail-jamming tools have made a big difference in the quality of material that gets to your mailbox, it’s not uncommon for an entire morning to pass in which you feel like you completed no work: you simply spent all of your time answering email.
No matter how important some of the messages are, answering email can be a major drain on your time and can effectively take you way from other office activities and functions. Sifting through the long list of emails in your inbox can eat up hours—and attempting to stem the onrushing tide by handling emails the moment they “ding” into your mailbox can mean that you never have more than two or three minutes of uninterrupted time to devote to “real” work projects and problems.
