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Abstract

Email Management generally refers to the systems and methods that can be implemented to become more efficient when it comes to handling the abundance of email office workers received every day. Email management is a method for increasing email efficiency while reducing the negative effects that email handling can have on an individual's productivity and job satisfaction. In the workplace, inadequate email management may waste a significant amount of an employee's time, as well as obstruct other employees, and have a detrimental influence on the firm as a whole. Email processing can take up more than 30% of an employee's workday, and if handling patterns aren't streamlined, it might be much more.

Background of Email

Worldwide daily Email traffic 2015-2019 ^[1].

The very first version of what we now know as email was invented in 1965 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) This was a part of the university’s Compatible Time-Sharing System, which allowed users to share files and messages on a central disk ^[2]. This was a huge revalation since now communication could happen fast and instant, through the advancement and the expansion of technology email fast became the common way for communication both in businesses and private alike. At the end of the 1990s emails had gone from a luxury/curiosity to become a societal expectation like having a phone number.

Today Emails are by far the most common way of communication with a staggering 333.2 billion emails sent every day (2022) ^[3]and in total there are estimated to exist about 5.59 billion active email accounts worldwide ^[4].

Email is used for organizations of all sizes such as the government communicating with the population, B2B, B2C as well as one of the most prominent ways to market. As the number of internet users continues to grow and communication through the internet has become a daily routine. Marketing through emails has become a commonplace, even an inevitable phenomenon. Nowadays marketers use a lot of effort on webinars and video campaigns as well as other new opportunities to reach their customers. But even with new ways of marketing sprouting everyday, email still seems to be generally the most effective. Email in fact generates 42$ for every 1$ spent which amounts to 4.200% of ROI^[5] as well as being up to 40 times more effective at reaching target consumers, than Twitter or Facebook^[6] making email by far out scale any other options for marketing. The global E-mail marketing market was valued at $7.5 billion in 2020 and is projected to increase to $17.9 billion by 2027. ^[7].

Importance of managing emails

In organizations, it is clear to see why email remains one of the most popular means of communication both for social environments as well as for businesses. Email makes it quick and user-friendly, enabling quick decision-making within the organization. Compared to other means of communication, emails are also one of the most cost effective ^[8] and a rich^[9] form of communicating. With these characteristics, email usage provides significant gains both for organizational productivity as well as efficiency.

Even though there is no doubt how much organizations across the globe are benefitting from using email to communicate both internally and externally, emails come with some pitfalls. The volume of emails sent and received every day is huge, which also results in this volume having huge cost implications, both organisationally and personally. To support the volume of emails organizations are estimated to spend up to $17 billion every year on email software as well as work time spent reading and writing emails.^[1]. It is estimated that workers on average will spend 28% of the workday sending and checking their emails alone, which is about 10.5 hours per week in an average danish 37.5 hours workweeks ^[10]The average worker is also typically interrupted every 5 minutes by email.^[11] Consequently the phenomenon of information overload or; email overload emerges which is rather than email being beneficial for the organization and its users it now may be detrimental to the productivity. Email easy-to-use and substitute for other means of communications, such as meetings, calls, etc. may further reduce efficacy because a substantial proportion of emails sent or received within organizations are either non-business related (personal), non-business-critical, or just unsolicited spam.^[12]

In general, the phenomenon of email overload describes the situation where possible business disruption due to email use may significantly harm the well-being of users and impair their productivity. The term Email overload is well defined and is a phenomenon occurring when email use overwhelms the user. The term is most directly linked to the huge number of emails sent and received as well as the raw hours spent handling them such as writing, responding filing, and sorting them. Email overload is also less directly linked to the result of email use gives rise to the stress of its users.

The consequences of a huge volume of emails are that workers may fail to respond to critical mail, responded less accurately / wrong, ignore information, or even quit. Studies have shown that email systems contribute to the top two sources of workplace stress - constant interruptions and deadline pressures^[13] and the instantaneous nature of email might contribute to users feeling compelled to respond instantaneously coursing stress, as well as mail compiling in the inbox around the clock.

Email plays such a big role in most organizations and people's lives, that with prober email managing there is a lot to gain to be found. In fact, it is estimated that poor communication is the number one reason project fails and is a contributing factor in 56% of projects that have failed. ^[14]

Email Management

The core problem email management takes its roots in the email overload organizations face everywhere. Email overload is a well-established problem ^[8] and is a recognized problem, still many organizations fail to handle this problem. When it comes to email management there are two perspectives to be considered, the individual's perspective and the organizational perspective. The individual is what each person themself can do to handle and manage emails properly, making sure not to miss any critical information as well as not being stressed by the abundance of mail ticking in every hour. The organizational perspective is how the on an organizational level flow of information can be restricted or improved to help everyone within receive less and more focused mail lessening the burden.

Individual

Reduce the number of times you check the mail

The average office worker checks their email 15 times a day which is about every 37 minutes ^[15] which is far too often and by far more than necessary. A survey from march 2020 of 3.200 people showed that only around 33% of customers/clients expect a response in less than an hour ^[16] research also shows that it can take some people up 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully recover after an interruption ^[17]. A high portion of productiveness is lost due to overcheck mails and being distracted by the mail notification. To solve this problem The Institute of Management suggests individual users should turn off messaging notifications, only check emails as little as twice a day ^[13], of course, this might not be possible for a lot of jobs so generally close down the email and turn of notification and take time to check email every 1-2 hours should help a lot with efficiency.

When checking the mail

interruptions delays remove notification spend 10 every hour do the 10 minute triage

For optimizing the work the individual can get done one should turn off messaging notifications from emails since every email notification is a cause for interruption. One's emails should be checked in less frequently with around 1-2 hours frequency and the full focus should be set to

Sort mails correctly

Inbox 0

u re read mails cant find take time to find mail

Reduce number of irrelevant Emails

Write less and more clear and precise Mails

Email Overload often leads to frustration because of feeling work never gets done, in result, this leads to people trying to answer as fast as possible to get to the bottom of the unread mails ^[18] research suggest that one of the causes of email overload is that a lot of email send and received are unclear in coherant and therefor leads to more confusion and thus more emails. When sending a Email make sure that the Email has a clear and understandable subject as well as its content be short and clear so confusion does not arise.

Worldwide daily Email traffic 2015-2019 ^[1].

Organizational

Evans and Wright (2008) propose a strategic shift in organisational culture by discouraging the predominant use of email in favour of more effective methods such face to face or telephone interactions. They suggests companies should issue guidelines, which would include the use of email only after careful consideration, avoiding letter style writing, not send ‘thank you’ emails and using acceptable abbreviations, e.g. ‘FYI’. Seeley and Hargreaves (2003) and Ingham (2003) also recommend the issuing of email guidelines. Other popular solutions for improving email use within organisations include the use of clear subject lines (Jackson, Dawson, & Wilson, 2001), and companies investing in formal training for employees (Burgess et al., 2005, Lim and Teo, 2009).

Train employees

make sure what is the standard proceededer

Software that can help with the handling of Emails

Since ‘email overload’ was first identified in 1996, the majority of the research that followed (Dabbish and Kraut, 2006, Evans and Wright, 2008, Fisher et al., 2006, Schuff et al., 2006) suggested technological solutions the majority of which are now evident in popular email software products such as Microsoft Outlook, which incorporates integrated applications for handling email, tasks, calendars and contacts and automatic rules for handling spam/junk email and for sorting/clustering emails into pre-defined folders.

Limitations

Unfortunately it is not possible to have a fully automated system for handling emails duo to the inconsistent nature of emails contents but there are ways to make answering emails more streamlined and increase the quality

Annotated Bibliography

Following references may be beneficial for further reading on topic addressed in this article.

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2} The radicati groupehttps://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Email-Statistics-Report-2015-2019-Executive-Summary.pdf
2. ↑ The guardian (2016) How did email grow from messages between academics to a global epidemic? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/07/email-ray-tomlinson-history
3. ↑ Earth Web (2022) How many Emails are sent per day in 2022? https://earthweb.com/how-many-emails-are-sent-per-day/
4. ↑ Outlooktracker (2020) (https://www.outlooktracker.com/news/how-many-emails-does-the-average-office-worker-receive/)
5. ↑ hubspot https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-marketing-stats
6. ↑ Mckinsey - Why marketers should keep sending you e-mails https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/why-marketers-should-keep-sending-you-emails
7. ↑ Statista https://www.statista.com/statistics/812060/email-marketing-revenue-worldwide/
8. ↑ ^{8.0 8.1} Whittaker, S., and Sidner, C. Email overload: exploring personal information management of email. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI ’96, ACM (1996), 276–283.
9. ↑ N.Panteli (2002) Richness, power cues and email text pp. 75-86
10. ↑ Mckinsey - The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies - https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-social-economy
11. ↑ T. Jackson, R. Dawson, D. Wilson - Reducing the effect of email interruptions on employees International Journal of Information Management, pp. 55-65
12. ↑ N. Nelson (2003) - Anti-spam for business and ISPs: Market size 2003–2008
13. ↑ ^{13.0 13.1} BBC (2000) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/654956.stm
14. ↑ Project management institute 2015 -https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/communication-method-content-in-project-9937
15. ↑ Forbes - Annabel Acton (2017) - https://www.forbes.com/sites/annabelacton/2017/07/13/innovators-challenge-how-to-stop-wasting-time-on-emails/?sh=716b845a9788
16. ↑ Jeff Toister & SuperOffcice (2020) - https://www.toistersolutions.com/blog/how-quickly-should-you-respond-to-email
17. ↑ Gallup business Journal - Gloria Mark - 2006 - https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/23146/too-many-interruptions-work.aspx
18. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named Austrailia

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