
It lets people know that you’ll be away and they shouldn’t expect a response until you’re back (or not at all). Setting an out of office message is one of the best parts of going on vacation. Use your out of office message to set response-time expectations To control your inbox, you need to set boundaries. Yet, only 25% had ever spoken to a teammate or manager about this expectation! In fact, when we surveyed hundreds of knowledge workers, 63.5% of people said they expect an email response within an hour. Your team or clients don’t know you’re only checking messages once or twice a day. The problem is that this method is one-sided. Rather than check your inbox all day, bundling all your communication time into one or two 30-minute batches leaves you more time to focus. Most advice on handling communication time suggests that you deal with your inbox in batches. And if you want to make time to do your most important work, you need to set boundaries and expectations around how you handle your email. What Peck gets at is the awkward truth about email: it’s often just another distraction.īeing busy and being productive are two very different things. “Sending messages speedily makes us think we’re important instead of taking time to really chew on ideas, and it punts work onto other people’s agendas rather than asking us to figure things out ourselves.” It’s no wonder email makes us feel stressed, scattered, and unfocused. Instead of focusing on our most important work, we’re spending all day monitoring and adding to a non-stop influx of messages, requests, and (often) meaningless banter.

Most people check their email and chat apps every 6 minutes or less.70% of emails are opened within 6 seconds of receiving them.84% of people keep their inboxes open all day long.132 billion business emails are sent every day.
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Here are a few scary email statistics to illustrate this point: It only takes a second or two to check our own inbox and quickly reply.īut every sent email has a cost in both time and attention. This is because we see email as “fast and free,” as startup advisor Sarah K. The near-instant nature of your inbox means it’s too easy to shoot off a message the second you have a question or CC ten colleagues on a simple request. Not a communication issue.Įmail is still one of the best workplace tools we have. Find out how RescueTime can help you double your productivity and try it for free! Inbox overload is a prioritization issue. Take control of your time (and your inbox).
