“Robert Corrao has seven different Macs, an Apple TV, and of course an iPhone and an iPad to carry with him wherever he goes,” Joel Mathis reports for Macworld. “he chief operating officer at LAC Group, a professional services company in Los Angeles, doesn’t mind loading himself down with technology, but he’s not always a fan of what it brings: Email, and plenty of it.”
“He estimates he receives 500 emails a day—and that the average inbox in his organization contains 5000 emails,” Mathis reports. “It’s all too much, and too little of it is important. ‘It kills me,’ he said. ‘Just deleting—not even reading—that still takes a good chunk of the day.'”
Mathis reports, “So Corrao is leading his company on an effort to get rid of email—not the individual pieces that clutter up the inboxes, but email itself.”
Read more in the full article here.
This article overlooks the work of the brilliant Merlin Mann whose method “In Box Zero” has made many of us extremely happy without adding more BS apps to our routine.
+1
My inbox contains over 9000 unread emails. Yea, I said it OOOVVERRR 9000!!!! You don’t have to read everything that droops in, don’t feel the pressure. I delete spam every day and read some important emails and some other mail if I feel like it. The trick is to not feel mandated to read everything that droops in. Relax.
Thank iOS for any spelling errors :p
MAIL / PREFERENCES / RULES
Setup email filters; force 98% of the crap you do not wish to deal with to the trash OR as spam OR as junk to delete automatically. It’s not that hard.
Man I hate e-mail. Almost makes me wish Al Gore never invented the internet.
cue the Gore haters in 3…2…1…
Al Gore didn’t invent the internet. He promoted the infrastructure.
And he never claimed to have invented the internet either.
By his own claim he took credit for “creating” the Internet. “Inventor” is too lowly a word for a man of Gore’s ego. “Creator” is more the Gore personna.
He will like the “VIP” feature in ML/iOS 6 😉
Who says you HAVE to delete emails everyday? Is this a problem of the obsessively compulsive mainly? I have thousands of unread emails at any one time (no spam as I don’t use that address for social purposes) and I archive it monthly.
This reminds me of a story someone told me about an exec that was tired of having to delete so many emails every day. After analysis, it was found that they were mostly SPAM, so a filter was installed, tested, tweaked then implemented. The next week, the exec complained that something must be wrong because all their email was gone!! 🙂
@ Wrong Again…I’m wondering, why do you have thousands of non-spam emails unread at any one time? Assuming it takes on average 30 seconds to read an email, 10 seconds to react to it, and 20 seconds to respond to it, that adds up to 1000 minutes. Assuming that there are 1400 minutes in a 24-hour day, that leaves you with 400 minutes (about 7 hours) to take care of everything else (eat, sleep, personal hygiene, commute, use the phone, take care of non-email business, etc.). You must be strung tighter than a violin. I don’t have an answer to the question of how to reduce your load but I wish you well, sir. [no sarcasm intended]
Ah, Jeff, the assumption is that I need to do anything with them! For someone that simply MUST see their inbox all read and dispatched (responded/deleted), it would be and is an arduous task… for them, that is. For me, I know from sender and subject if it’s for me. If not, it gets ignored. There are thousands of unread emails because there are hundreds one day, hundreds the next. Over thirty days it adds up. When my storage allotment is almost up, I save off the oldest thirty days and keep on going.
I’ve never understood the idea that every single email you receive needs to be read or deleted. I know some people are like that and for those people, it’s difficult to work in a moderate to large sized company, but it’s never been a problem for me.
Email has not evolved from the original intent. Email was supposed to be an electronic way to send a letter.
Today, it is a: mail, chat, calendar, SPAM, advertising, invitation, photo sharing, application.
I think Corrao is on to something but for now, we need better web apps to handle all this socializing like Twitter, chat programs, and such.
People need to use less email for other than sending a letter.
There is no problem with email. Its operator error.
A little refresher for those struglng with email.
Serious business contacts get one email address. Family gets another. Signing up for stuff, subscriptions and other spammy stuff another. But most of all don’t be slutty and be selective to who you give your email to.
Problem solved.
2nd this.
I have 4 myself. A little pre thought on your end, can save you a ton of time.
My forum/contest/spam catching email, is NOT entered into apple mail… I log in via safari only, maybe 1-2 times a week to clear it out. And 99% is spam that I can just group and delete in about 5 minutes.
.me aliases come in handy too.
Agreed.
I have worked with people that are email carpetbombers. The solution is not getting rid of email, which many use effectively, but getting people to understand
1. not every thought requires an email annoucement
2. hitting reply all to kiss the bosses ass is more douchey than necessary
The analysis is really flawed.
The problem is not email. Email itself works fine. It works so well that we still use it. In fact, email was the Internet killer application, way before the web.
Email has a huge advantage over any of the proposed solutions: It’s a universal protocol: You can choose out of thousands of email providers and still, you’ll be connected. You can mover your address from ISP to ISP if you own your domain. You can set your own mail server if you want to.
Using a social network, you (and your communications) are at the mercy of whomever manages that. And what if you don’t like the service, but it becomes the “default”? Would you like to be forced to open a Facebook or Google account to be able to communicate with others?
It’s not about email. It’s about how to manage it. I use email and I don’t fee overwhelmed by it. I separate my accounts: One for work, one for personal and one for subscriptions, forums, etc. Mail has great spam filters, so I don’t have to deal with it. If I get overwhelmed by any service, I just opt out.
I really don’t see the problem, unless you’re a celebrity.
Back in the 90s I worked for an outfit with HQ in Silicon Valley and offices in Belgium and Bonn. Email in the form of QuickMail was the way we communicated among these offices. We had a manager who even then tried to control the use of email to the most basic of communication. No “conversational” emails were permitted – that is, no invitations to join in a group outing to lunch, no forwarding the latest jokes, no sports chatter. I felt at the time that it was a good policy as it focused email use on the business, not on social things.
In the aughts I was at another outfit where the opposite was policy. Nobody chatted person to person, they all chatted by email. The guy in the next cubicle would email me constantly rather than suggest we go to the break room or the lab to discuss one problem or another. I rapidly learned how to set up rules and sort incoming emails according to these rules so that I had a handle on priorities. I even had rules to sort of bounce messages – if it was someone on my floor who emailed me, my rule sent back a stock reply: “Meet me at my cubicle and we’ll discuss.”
Now I’m retired and email is a good way to remain in touch with former colleagues, friends, and relatives, many of whom are scattered across the US and overseas. I’m not on f/b and I don’t tweet and (for philosophical reasons) won’t touch anything google, so email is my primary long distance communications tool.
If you’re getting 500+ emails a day then you’ve given it to too many unimportant people.
Just keep the baby when getting rid of the bathwater.
I’ve kept all of my email since the mid-80s. I never delete any, and don’t really see the need to.
As others have posted here, there are solutions.
Have multiple email addresses:
1) Work
2) Family and Friends
3) Spammy (accounts, registrations, etc…)
Consider also having a Super Spammy account where you have to enter your email address, but you know you never want to read anything you receive there. Likewise, you may have another account for mailing lists or other purposes.
Make sure you’ve got good spam filtering on the server. Gmail is actually really good for this, Yahoo is ridiculously horrible.
Use an email client instead of Web interface.
Set up your email client to also filter spam.
Set up your email client to filter based on source, into folders for mailing lists, friends, family, whitelists… etc…
Make sure you understand how to search, sort, and mark your messages.
Again, I get thousands of messages a day across multiple accounts. It’s not that hard.
Don’t put your email address out everywhere and sign up for things all over. I rarely get spam on my normal email accounts. If I sign up for stuff I send it to my email address that was setup for signing up for things so this doesn’t happen then all spam goes to one spam email account.
I get about 300 BUSINESS emails a day, about 30-50 of which I have to respond to. No personal or wasteful emails. It takes a very large chunk of my day. The worst is when I go on vacation for a week or two, it takes days to get caught up. Either my life really sucks, or you guys aren’t very important in your organizations.
So, it takes a lot of your time to do your job? Me too. At least 8 hours a day on most occasions. 🙂 What, would you rather they pull you into a meeting room or come chattering about your desk or catch you on way to the bathroom? If you MUST respond to 50 emails, then that means business isn’t getting done, so answering those 50 emails is your job.
I can think of many worse ways to spend 8-10 hours a day…
My god people… Do any of you know how to actually use your mail client?? Outlook and Apple Mail support mail sorting rules so you can sort email into sub folders using any criteria you want. Try it… You can have a very tidy mailbox!
Barracuda spam firewall. Best investment our company has ever made in regards to email. Cut out 99% of the crap. No weeding required.