Smit Shah

Less emails = More Productivity

Working for a large retailer in their IT department, one of the things I noticed was the quanitity of emails that were sent everday.

On average , I was sending about 50 emails a day. And they all had an average of 10 people on each emails.

If you do the math, it is about 500 emails that I was sending out on a daily basis.

Of the 10 people on the email, there were on average 2 who the email was directed to. The other 8 were there so "they were in the loop"

Now only if the email was sent to people necessary, the productivity would improve by 80% in terms of time spent reading emails.

It was more important to send the emails out, to keep everyone in the "loop" that the actual work took a back seat.

I think this is where the IT world has lost its focus. From providing a solution, to knocking out emails.

What I would propose is to limit the number of emails and the number of people on those emails can be sent to by position.

This will force employees to choose what matters are worth communicating and which emails are just noise.

Tie their performance evaluations to the number of excessive emails they send.

The communication with be less, yet more effective.
                                                                                         
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