E-mail Ouch!

You’d think high end IT companies would have this technology stuff down cold.

Not.

Check this out from CIO Magazine’s article about Intel’s battle with information overload

Knowledge workers spend about 20 hours a week doing e-mail, and one-third of that e-mail is useless,” explains Zeldes. Worse, 70 percent of e-mail gets handled within six minutes of arrival and the average worker is interrupted every three minutes, according to research. “When you switch between tasks, you incur a cognitive reorientation cost,” says David Sward, a senior human factors engineer at Intel and one of Zeldes’s partners on the infomania project. The bottom line was that Intel’s workers were wasting about six hours a week.

Almost a complete day every week is wasted on e-mail.

At least Intel is trying to do something about it.

And I plead guilty, though I am trying to read my e-mail only every couple of hours just so I can get something done.

Scot