By Flora Haslam
That we're drowning in email can hardly come as a surprise (and indeed might not have been such a big story this week were it not August), but the latest research from the Universities of Glasgow and Paisley made for some surprising reading in the recommendations it drew.
Its suggestion that email senders at work should set aside dedicated email reading times to catch up on their messages and never press other employees to respond to email is a slightly worrying prospect for the PR industry at least. Meanwhile, the recommendation that workers should check their emails just a few times a day seems somewhat unrealistic, particularly given the research was conducted among academics and creatives.
I daren't think how quickly a PR agency would go out of business if this was the case, or how many pitches the journalist that sent out a response source three hours ago would have already read by the time you got around to opening his email!
Yes, unlike a phone call, email allows you to make a decision about whether to respond straight away - assuming the sender hasn't slapped a read receipt on it and isn't circling with their hand on the phone receiver from the moment you click open - but I for one certainly haven't got the willpower to refrain from opening a message as soon as I see it.
Whether the contents are good ("I'd be delighted to profile your client in the FT") or bad ("I'm afraid our CEO is now unable to make it to London for the day of briefings you've arranged tomorrow"), I still want to know as soon as possible. And my suspicion is that anyone - in our profession at least - able to leave emails unread for hours on end is simply not cut out for the job.
Granted it's vital to have a system that allows you to get work done without email taking over your life, but I'm not convinced that email reading slots are the way forward. Maybe we just need to cut back on the fantasy football and cats that look like Hitler chat that regularly circulates the office. Err, or is that just our office?!
Comments