E-mail addiction August 7
If my hunch is correct, you and I probably spend most of our day on email. Reading and responding to, for the most part, unimportant messages. ‘Unimportant’ defined as ‘not critical to answer in the next 4 hours’. ‘Critical’ defined as ‘I could really blow this apart if they don’t get an answer right away’.
Our Speed of Response seems to define us. The quicker we hit reply and answer back, the better. Is it efficient, possibly. Is it effective, nope.
On that note, one day I’d like to do a study to see what the real business cost is to an email sent that is supposed to have an attachment but the person forgets to add the attachment. You know the ones, “I’ve attached to this email…blah, blah.” People respond back “Was there supposed to be an attachment, yadda?” Then it’s “Ooops, please find the attachment in this email…”
Add up the salary time wasted on that scenario and I bet it costs North American business millions…