In the last few months, I have been increasingly suffering from a problem which seems to have crept up. I’ve read about people declaring ‘e-mail bankruptcy’ and ‘e-mail free Fridays’ in some companies but being involved with quite a few businesses, neither of these is honestly something I could contemplate seriously.

My inbox always seems to be at around 500 e-mails no matter how much I clear it. If I remove half of them today, by close of business tomorrow it will be back at this level. Most of these e-mails are also ‘action items’ of some kind requiring me to respond (usually with something that would take me 5-15 minutes to deal with per e-mail; so if we assume an average of 10 minutes and 400 e-mails, this would be around 67 hours of “replying to e-mails”).. that’s over 8 working days at normal hours, or 4.2 working days in ‘theo‘ hours..

So, if you haven’t had a reply from me, it may be because your e-mail didn’t require attention this very minute (most fall into this category), it would take too long to reply to now (second most popular), I trust you from having known you so long that I know you won’t take my lack of reply personally (even a few long term customers belong in here), or because I think your e-mail is so pointless it shouldn’t have been sent in the first place.

So, how does everyone else manage this?