How Email is Strangling Your Business

I remember when I started using email in the 1980s at IBM, it was an easy way to communicate with a large number of people with relatively little effort. Fast forward 30 years, the volume of email is so large that it's squashing the productivity potential of small businesses. Employees waste too much time checking for new emails or reading old ones repeatedly because they were not acted upon the first time.

Jerry Hopkins, founder of The Leadership Team, says “There is a natural curiosity whether in our home or professional life to want to check who has been in touch and what they have had to say. But the reality is that very few people in business need to look at their emails more than two or three times a day."

Employees should be trained to follow these simple guidelines like checking email only a few times a day. Have them turn off any pop up notifications on their desktop or mobile devices. Train them to read each email once and act upon it. This can be done by replying and filing it or setting a specific date for follow up.

[Fresh Business Thinking] 

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