From the CTO…
All,
I get a ton of emails, every day.
I manage my inbox by how many emails sit in it.
Less than 50: I’m happy.
Over 100: I feel like I’m behind
200 or more: I stay up late on Friday and empty my inbox back down to less than 50
And the cycle starts over on Monday…
Rather than trying to figure out how I could empty/triage my inbox faster, I asked myself this question: why am I getting all those emails, and what can I do to get less?
I think there are several issues at play here:
· We have no intranet
· Too many CCs (CYA?)
· Long emails thread (w/o actionable tasks and ownership) in place of quick group discussions
· Not clear who is the best point of contact for given requests
· Unsettled meetings
· Lack of delegation
· Geographic split
And more
I know I am not alone in this situation. Why? Because I checked our email server log and found that we exchange over 100K emails per week across the company. That’s about 150 emails per person per day. At 1 minute per email to read/respond/triage/delete, that’s 2h per person, every day. I mean, as a company, we spend 25% of our time in outlook!
This needs to stop.
This is a problem with many tentacles for which I will need people to help me with putting solutions in place.
So I will create the Email Squishing Group (ESG) for that purpose. I will keep it at 5-7 people. It is open to anyone in the company, regardless of title, seniority, tenure, department, age, gender, tattoos, hair color and geographic location.
I believe that you can only improve what you measure. As such, I have asked that we graph (as an anonymous aggregate) the average number of email per person. This will be our tool for measuring how successful we are at reducing email overload.
ESG will attack the problems at the source, change the company culture, and be bring solutions to life. It will also be a great opportunity for new employees to meeting the ________, and will provide a great chance to anyone for having a big impact on the company.
If you think you have the interest and high energy to join the ESG, and want to be a hero to Friday night inbox purge sickos, stop by my office or call me and make your case why you should be selected to join the ESG (by 6pm on Wednesday the 19th). I hope to hear from someone not in the LA office, as our geo split is likely a big culprit.
Don’t respond by email. Please ;)
