When you’ve been away from your computer for a few hours—or even a few minutes--do you ever come back to find dozens, perhaps hundreds of new email messages running all the way down the screen, right on out of sight? You’re not alone.
On October 22, the Radicati Group, a technology market research firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., issued its latest report on the extent to which electronic mail, or email, has taken over our lives.
According to the report, in 2012 there are more than 2.1 billion email users worldwide, including both business and consumer users—a number expected to grow to more than 2.76 billion in the next four years. Most of those users have more than one mailbox they use regularly, so the number of email accounts is far higher.
These 2.1 billion users will send more than 144 billion emails every day in 2012. By 2016, that number will grow to more than 192 billion. 89 billion of the emails sent today will be for business purposes. The number of business emails is expected to increase by about 13 percent per year over the next five years.
In our book, The Managers Communication Toolbox, we used numbers from the Radicati Group’s 2011 report to illustrate the tidal wave of emails today’s managers receive. We wrote that this deluge could easily take over your life, both personally and professionally, keeping you from doing the things you’re paid to do.
We spoke to Michael J. Kussman, MD, a retired U.S. Army General who also formerly headed the Veterans Health Administration, the nation’s largest health care system. We asked him how he managed the vast number of electronic communications he received every day.
Dr. Kussman told us that the most important thing you can do is to not let emails pile up unread. “Whenever I had five or ten minutes,” he said, “I’d read and answer a few—and on the many days I had lunch at my desk, I’d answer emails while I ate.”
Kussman prioritized the emails he received. He looked for the ones addressed directly to him, and read those first. Then he would get to the ones on which he was “cc:ed.” He estimated that only about 10 to 20 percent of the emails he received were important, but emphasized that he needed to be careful, because he never knew when a message that seems unimportant when it is being read could become important in the future.
Some executives he knew prioritized emails by having two email addresses: one for the general public, which was first read by staff members; and one for close friends and colleagues (the equivalent of an unlisted phone number.) Kussman has only one email address and has always read all his emails himself. He rarely used an “out-of-office” message, even while traveling, and regularly checked his email even on nights and weekends. “I’m going to have to answer the mail anyway,” he reasoned, “so why wait?”
As a senior leader and a commanding officer, Kussman often refrained from commenting on issues under email discussion, even though he may have had an opinion on the subject under discussion. “I wanted to encourage the free flow of discussion, not to stifle it. I know that as the leader of the organization, when I entered the dialogue my words had a different meaning. And when I did have something I felt I needed to write, I’d usually write it to the originator of the message only, instead of hitting “reply all.”
Dr. Kussman concluded the interview with three pieces of advice. “Keep your emails short, and encourage others to do the same. Always remind yourself that anything you say on email is open for others to read, one way or another, so don’t put anything in writing you wouldn’t want someone else to read, whether or not he or she is on one of the address lines.”
“And finally, if you feel uncomfortable about a message you’re writing, ask yourself several times if it’s OK before you hit that send button. I’d say I ended up not sending about half of the messages I wrote that I was concerned about!”
In our chapter titled “Composing emails that get action,” we offer a number of other good ideas to help readers manage their email in-boxes. We’d like to hear some of yours, however. Of the nearly 150 billion emails that will be sent today, about how many do you get—and how do you find the time to read them all, answer some, and still do your job?
