Do you look at your inbox and want to cry? If so, you\u2019re not alone. According to widely cited Radicati Group research, the average person gets 120 business emails every day. If you don\u2019t manage your emails, you could end up in another statistical majority. People spend at least 14 percent of their workday on email alone. Is it any wonder that a recent Harris Poll found that only 45 percent of our workdays are spent on actual work? If you\u2019re looking for the solution to your email woes, start with some of Silicon Valley greats.<\/p>\n
If you want to watch a corporate team start to sweat, see what happens when they get a \u201c?\u201d email from Jeff Bezos. Business Insider reports that the notoriously easy-to-contact Amazon CEO will forward customer complaints to his people and add only a question mark to the original query. Getting that dreaded mark is a little like getting the black spot from Blind Pew the pirate. You know that a day of reckoning is at hand. Follow Bezos\u2019 lead. Instead of answering all emails yourself, ask, \u201cCan this be better handled by someone else?\u201d Forward it to your team and save yourself the time. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0 You can also use auto-reply tools to manage the flood. Tommy John CEO Tom Patterson did just that after his emails skyrocketed from 150 to 400 a day. He tells Inc.com that \u201cthere weren\u2019t enough minutes in a day to answer all of them.\u201d So he didn\u2019t; he set up an auto-reply to tell people that he only checked email before 9 and after 5 \u2014 and to please call or text if it was urgent. The result? \u201cIt forced me to delegate and empower others to respond,\u201d he says. Suddenly the flow slowed to a trickle. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0 And it really should only be a trickle; Bill Gates reports that he only gets 40\u201350 emails a day. Ask yourself, \u201cShould I really be getting more emails than Bill Gates?\u201d One possible cause for email inundation, according to LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, is other employees sending too much email of their own. He writes, \u201cTwo of the people I worked most closely with ended up leaving the organization within the span of several weeks. After they left I realized my inbox traffic had been reduced by roughly 20\u201330 percent.\u201d If you have over-communicators in your ranks, ask them to tone back the digital flood. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0 Creating a hard buffer between your email and your life is another CEO tactic. Arianna Huffington doesn\u2019t check her email for a half hour after waking or before going to bed, and she never touches it around her kids. That space to breathe is essential to maintaining a work-life balance. And if it gets bad enough? Etsy\u2019s Chad Dickerson has a solution: email bankruptcy! He tells Fast Company that every few years, he just deletes everything and starts fresh! \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0 Not all Silicon Valley gurus have it figured out, however. Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn\u2019t get 120 business emails a day. No, according to an ABC interview, he gets closer to 700. He just gets up at the crack of dawn every morning and starts reading. Hint Water CEO Kara Goldin does the same thing, preparing for a 12-hour workday with a marathon email session. But as you can tell from the other people we\u2019ve discussed, this is an exception, not the rule. Emulate Jeff Bezos or Arianna Huffington instead and watch your email stress melt away. \u00a0 Contact us at\u00a0(310) 641-3274, email<\/strong> hi@sugarshot.io<\/a><\/strong>, or visit www.sugarshot.io\/contact-us\/<\/a>\u00a0to schedule our\u00a0Disaster Recovery Audit\u00a0<\/strong>FREE of charge.\u00a0Contact us TODAY to get scheduled!<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Do you look at your inbox and want to cry? If so, you\u2019re not alone. According to widely cited Radicati Group research, the average person gets 120 business emails every day. If you don\u2019t manage your emails, you could end up in another statistical majority. People spend at least 14 percent of their workday on […]","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":624,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,7],"tags":[15,34,35],"class_list":["post-598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-it-know-how","category-technology","tag-business","tag-email","tag-email-management-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sugarshot.io\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sugarshot.io\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sugarshot.io\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sugarshot.io\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sugarshot.io\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sugarshot.io\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sugarshot.io\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sugarshot.io\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sugarshot.io\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sugarshot.io\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}