Billion Dollar E-Mails

This week I returned to work after a 374 day absence.  It took more than a day to reactivate my email account.  I spent a total of ninety minutes over four different calls with the internal help desk in India.  Between calls there was a lot of waiting.  Finally, the level two team got a hold of me and the problem was fixed within the hour.  If only I could have avoided the day-and-a-half it took to get my problem routed to level two.  Anyhow....that is not the reason for this entry.

I now had a reactivated email account and so I retrieved my emails.  There were 3047.  Since I was not at work none of them were intended for me to action.  They were all informational.  Some from the project team that I last worked with, some from corporate communications, others from employees organizing events, etc.

Let's assume that I was at work and had read them all.  I would have spent an average of maybe a minute reading each one of those.  Over the year I therefore would have spent 3047 minutes (or fifty hours or just over six business days) reading these emails.

Alright, so how much of a hit is this on our productivity?  A year equates to 2080 hours of work (52 weeks at 40 hours a week).  If I subtract my vacation and stat holidays I need to reduce the 2080 by 256 hours.  So that leaves me with a potential 1824 hours of productive time.  My hit to productivity is therefore just under 3% (50/1824).  Doesn't seem like much really does it?  Let's have another look.

Now let's multiply this by dollars and by employees.   Let's assume that the fully burdened cost rate for an employee is in the $80 an hour range (salary, education, benefits, office space, IT and telephony infrastructure, etc).  My fifty hours of reading these emails therefore cost the corporation $4000.  If you multiply that by an organization that is about 300,000 employees strong it equates to....... $1.2 billion dollars!!!!!!

If anything is to be learnt here it is that we need to think twice before we send emails out.  Think about who you are addressing them to - will the recipients really benefit from reading it and will it result in increased, useful (key) knowledge.  Be careful who you copy on your emails.  Do these recipients really need to know what you and some other folks are doing?  Is there value?

There is nothing new here of course.  The interesting thing is that my year away from work highlighted the fact by clumping all of my spam into one day.  Had I spent my fifty hours over the year of regular work I would not have realized the impact.  I would have been in the box.  Being away forced my perspective to change.  My view of the problem changed.  The box changed.

What did I do when I saw the 3047 unread emails?  I highlighted them all and, with a great deal of satisfaction, hit the delete key.  Fifty hours of work taken care of in about three minutes.  Now THAT is productive.

Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!