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How to manage your business emails more efficiently?

Photo du rédacteur: Melanie BlaserMelanie Blaser

Dernière mise à jour : 6 janv.

Don’t interrupt me while I’m interrupting. — Winston S. Churchill


Messages are clearly a source of stress, especially if you keep interrupting your work to read them. Our brains can only handle so much information at a time and cannot concentrate effectively on a task in hand, if in between two lines of an Excel table or in the middle of writing a document, we are reading or dealing with messages that have nothing to do with our work in progress. A human being’s concentration is optimal for 40 to 60 minutes on an activity.


Photo de Yura Fresh sur Unsplash
Photo de Yura Fresh sur Unsplash

Statistics


According to a McKinsey study, we spend an average of 13 hours a week checking our messages, we check our messages 77 times a day, we send and receive over 122 emails a day and we spend 28% or more of our time checking our messages. According to some sources, following tests on groups of people, we lose 20 minutes when we are interrupted in our work, even if only to pick up where we left off, and our error rate doubles following an interruption. Psychologists agree that our brains work best when they are only handling one task at a time.


Strategy


During my career, I worked in a telecom company, where most of the employees were geeks before their time. Everyone was connected at all hours and we were all bombarded with messages all the time. In this kind of environment, it was hard to resist the “call of the message”. But our management, and especially my HR manager, had decided to lead by example. My manager had established the following strategy in relation to emails and messages of all kinds: he would arrive at work early in the morning, read and answer his emails. Then he would deal with his messages between sessions and at the end of the day. He never interrupted an activity to read his messages, he never read his messages during a session. He also imposed a 3-day (maximum) response time on all his contacts. And this system worked perfectly. Furthermore, an emergency was not to be dealt with by email, it was to be addressed to him directly or by phone.


Everyone can set their own email strategy, but it is important to stick to it. Let your colleagues and subordinates know that you have a deadline for responding and that you respect it. Agree with your manager that if you don’t respond immediately to their messages, you have a valid reason. You can, for example, put an automatic acknowledgement of receipt or insert a sentence in your signature. Choose the best strategy for your work, taking into account the other interruptions you experience during the day: telephone, colleagues or clients coming to you for information, etc.


Steps to take


The first rule of thumb is to turn off alarms, all alarms: visual, audible, vibratory, push. Next, set times for email processing according to your day. Assume that your emails are not to be read, but processed. It is a task in itself. Your email inbox is not just a to-do list, it is a place where you receive items that need to be managed: the action that certain messages require needs to be carried out, the items you need for the future need to be put away in a systematic and orderly way and those that are not needed will be deleted. Some messages can be dealt with quickly, others require more time. In any case, going to see your emails means that you are going to deal with them and you need time to do so, just as you need time when you are undertaking a task, project or activity. During the other hours of the day, concentrate on your work and don’t interrupt to check your email.


Conclusion


Establish a strategy and stick to it, talk to your manager and colleagues, for example in a meeting. Cancel all alarms and treat email processing as a task in its own right. As a general rule, avoid all possible interruptions. This will improve your concentration and you will perform better every day.


This article was first published in French on joHdi. Original title "Comment gérer ses mails professionnels de manière plus efficace".

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