Think email is controlling your work life? Check out the in-box of John Halamka, the chief information officer for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School.
According to a recent Boston Globe story, Halamka “leaves 50 percent of his day’s schedule open for responding to 600 daily e-mails and other ad hoc situations.”
If you work in a modern institution of any size, you know the feeling. Here are the numbing numbers as reported in the Globe piece.
- Workers get an average 156 e-mails a day.
- We switch tasks every three minutes on average.
- We spend more than a quarter of the workday dealing with interruptions and their needed recovery time.
The result? We feel that we never get ahead: we bounce like a pinball from one HIGH PRIORITY! email to another. We don’t have time for long-term planning. We can’t focus enough to be creative. Life is one big firefight.
No wonder we’re stressed.
The good news is that companies are starting to do something about the problem. Software developers inside IBM, for example, avoid meetings, emails, and calls on Fridays.
Read Creativity Can Thrive, if You Keep the E-mail in Check in the Globe for tips on what other people are doing to manage the info madness.
Do you have technology blackout days at work? How do you stay on top of it all?
(Information overload image by Bueny Pixs , CC 2.0)
