Wasting time on email
Monday, March 7th, 2011Indus Khaitan of The Morpheus sent me an interesting post on “How we waste time on email”.
The inbox, used appropriately, can be one of the most successful productivity tools of all time. For most of us, however, it ends up being a huge time sink.
Yes, true!
We found there were a number of deadly pains of email, but probably the biggest one was trying to keep track of complex interdependent tasks where you have to contact other people and involve them in a network of obligations…
Yes, yes, yes.
One of the reasons such “networks of obligations” are so taxing, Bellotti says, is that crucial information may be in any one of the replies, and it’s difficult for the recipient to remember just where. Thus, copious amounts of time are spent scrolling through the thread looking for that critical project deadline or contact number. She estimates that about 20% of the time in email “is spent either organizing stuff of trying to find stuff.”
A messaging system (a.k.a email) that used to be a one on one tool has been transformed into a tool that project managers and teams love. True, it is easy to email tasks and project messages around but as the complexity increases, so will the frustration of finding things. They say time is money.
This was the whole point we created DeskAway and our one line pitch is still the same:
DeskAway is a tool to overcome the limitations of email and spreadsheet-based collaboration by helping teams organize, manage, and track their work from a central location.
Check out the article here.
