By Margaret Rock | Wed Jan 25, 2012 2:11 pm |
Office workers around the world are detoxing their inboxes this week, devoting five whole days to organizing the often unwieldy barrage of electronic communications.
Is This Thing On?, or ITTO, is our Wednesday column showing how everyday people use technology in unexpected ways.The Fifth International "Clean Out Your Inbox Week" challenges workers [to take a moment to get back on track and shovel out from under the e-mail pile. U.S. workers currently devote about 25 percent of their time dealing with over 500 billion e-mail messages each day. The designated week isn't about deleting the contents of the inbox, but focuses instead on getting a better handle on which messages are important, therefore allowing users to boast, albeit briefly, "inbox zero" on Facebook or Twitter. "Let's say you have 300 items in your inbox," said Marsha Egan, a workplace productivity coach and author of the book "Inbox Detox and the Habit of Email Excellence." "It's akin to having 300 separate pieces of paper on your desk -- not in files, not in piles -- there for you to just shuffle through. Therein becomes part of the productivity drain." Organizing emails in the right folder rather than keeping them in one huge list is a good way to clear through the distraction. Egan suggests thinking of the inbox as a house or apartment. "You get the mail each day and you sort it," Egan said. "You would never put it back in!" By doing the opposite with your e-mail inbox, "you're setting yourself up for productivity problems and stress problems," she said. For example, a general inbox shouldn't store an email from a boss requesting a specific report in three weeks. Scrolling past it everyday until the project is due doesn't increase efficiency, rather, it causes unnecessary distraction, and worse, it can cause the owner to experience pangs of anxiety or forgetfulness that prompt repeated readings of the message. Egan calls this the office's equivalent to the movie "Groundhog Day." To remedy the situation, Egan recommends workers set up an action folder for things that need to be done at a future date -- and set calendar reminders as the deadline nears. She also suggests creating other folders for reference material, like a personal library for client correspondence and project documentation. The next step in tackling an inbox is sorting, which Egan says should be based on five actions: to-do, delete, delegate, defer, and save for reference. "But don't delay!" she stresses. "Don't say, 'I'll decide another day.'" This is "clean" out the inbox week, not postpone it, after all, and Egan isn't the only one handing out advice and solutions. Google is offering tips as well this week, making sure to mention its 350 million member-strong Gmail product, which uses threads to compress inboxes, rather than manually moving them into designated folders. Gmail makes it easy for users to search for specific messages by collating emails into threads, which is helpful since researches found people with high thread-count e-mails were less likely to use or need to use folders, and people with more threads were less likely to need to scroll through their inboxes. Once the e-mail system is sparkling clean, experts recommend adopting responsible practices to keep it that way. "There's a huge difference between sorting your inbox and working it," Egan said. Egan says e-mail users need discipline, likening her approach to dealing with children -- they can't go to bed before they put all of their toys away. Don't leave the office before taking a last sweep of that inbox, she says. A slimmed-down inbox may inspire workers to keep the momentum going, and targeting other electronics clutter could be the next step. Users can toss items like an MP3 player, stand-alone GPS unit, and even an older digital camera, since built-in capabilities or apps on smartphones can most likely handle picture-taking, directions and musical needs. Also, extra USB drives can also be cleaned out, saving files instead using cloud technology or simply by emailing the important files as an attachment and saving them in a folder. The idea of a week devoted to cleaning out your inbox may be lighthearted, but the productivity reasons behind it are enough to prompt some businesses to revisit e-mail use entirely. For example, Atos Origins, a French technology firm, plans to discontinue using internal e-mail in favor of social media. The company's CEO, Thierry Breton, points out massive data production is polluting the working environment and invading workers' personal lives in the form of unnecessary e-mail communication. His company plans to revolutionize business communications among his 74,000 employees in 42 offices by eliminating e-mail by 2013. Atos will experiment with the right combination for its communication needs, but the company reports it has already reduced internal e-mail by 20 percent since it began working toward its zero-e-mail goal several months ago. One day other companies may also rethink their communications systems, but in the meantime, employees can save themselves time, energy and aggravation if they celebrate Clean Out Your Inbox Week by reducing their own digital garbage.
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