Do you spend too much time checking email that you are a) not the primary recipient, b) do not need to be reading or c) find yourself not reading at all because it doesn’t relate to anything of interest?
Some statistics from Email Marketing Reports:
- 247 billion emails are sent each day. That’s one email every 0.00000035 seconds.
- In the time it takes you to read this sentence, some 20 million emails entered cyberspace.
- Every second, the world’s email users produce messages equivalent in size to over 16,000 copies of the Complete Works of Shakespeare.
- 13.4 billion: the number of direct marketing dollars forecast to go on email in the US in 2009.
Problem
Time management and efficiency are a huge part of an entrepreneur’s arsenal in the battle for success and everyone has the problem of an ever increasing portion of the day being spent sifting through uncessary electonic communications (not even going to touch on twitter or facebook right now).
Current Events
Google’s Priority InBox shows us how we can try to see the tree among the forest, but in an ever growing world of content that “Priority” status should start to see more and more cream rising and eventually you’ll have TMI again.
A Sporting Solution
In the NBA one of the most important statistic’s is players plus/minus +/-. Players who score (email) most can have their positive offensive performance negated if the other team scores (doesn’t reply to an email) more when that player is on the court. People should be penalized for sending emails to more than one person that do not get a reply.
This might sound harsh but sometimes people need to be taught how to manage their communications and right now there’s no complete solution in place.