Rehumanize Your Business

CHAPTER 2Email: The Indispensable, Broken Tool

At the turn of the millennium, email was great. We didn't receive very many emails and we appreciated each and every one we received. Open rates? Through the roof! The senders? People we knew personally—mom, uncle, sister, friend, colleagues, and companies we had well-established relationships with. “You've got mail!” sang AOL, reinforced by the impossibly charming 1998 film starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Remember that? I know it's distant. I know it's got the romanticism in which hindsight's often wrapped. But email was pretty great.

“YOU'VE GOT MAIL”

A romantic connection to email today? Not so much. One estimate has American workers spending one third of their work time in the inbox. That's at least 17 hours every week for the 40% of us with 50-hour workweeks.¹ A survey of 1,500 highly educated Canadian workers found that they spend 11.7 hours at work and 5.3 hours at home on email each week. They receive more than 120 emails per day and about half are regarded as spam.² Which generation spends the most time on email? Millennials, by far, at 6.4 hours per day.³ If you work in a professional capacity, you use email. Often.

Even though we complain of being overwhelmed, nearly half of us report electively checking our work email outside normal work hours and more than half of us check personal email while we're at work. A survey of more than 1,000 white-collar American workers found that 27% of us check work email while having ...