Workload analysis: emails

illusionek

Hello

I have been asked recently to do workload analysis. It is actually something I raised in the past as I feel my current workload exceeds no of hrs available.

A large portion of my time is spent on reading or sending emails. I can easily get number of emails for each day however I struggle to allocate timing to show the impact.

I was wondering if there is some sort of study or rule of the thumb I could use here so.my numbers make sense. Obviously some emails take 5sec whilst others 10min so I want to make sure my estimation is reasonable and ideally based on something other than my say so.

mr_munchem

What exactly are you asking? I think time taken to deal with emails has such a huge variety that it would be impossible to apply a generic study to your work.

Perhaps rather than spending time (which you say is very limited) trying to reduce your workload, it might be a good idea to read up on your own productivity and see if you might be able to make some improvements?

Lots of people I know will only answer emails at certain times of the day - you could try this for sure! Also don't let emails replace phone/face-to-face conversations as they will nearly always take longer.

Diamandis

You need to do a time and motion study for a period. Use a timer to see how long you're spending dealing with each email so you can work out how many minutes you spend on this per day then average this out over a few weeks.

illusionek

@mr_munchem

In order to improve my productivity I need to spend some time to identify where losses occur

@Diamandis

I was afraid this may be the only answer. It would be a proper pain in **** to do it, thats the reason I am looking for some independent study I could use as avg

agrinnall

Take a look through the results of this Google Scholar search, for most of them you should at least be able to read the abstract, and some will be either open source or provide access to an uploaded PDF. If that doesn't work, try some other search terms in Scholar.

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=email+time+management&oq=email+time+

[Deleted User]

I used to have target of 70 per day when it came to one place that was data entry and also when I worked at a company responding to their emails on an average 7.5 hour days. Though couple of years ago now.

I read somewhere once as a fact - you should look at an email for really no more then 20 seconds before deciding what to do with it.

74jax

illusionek wrote: »

Hello

I have been asked recently to do workload analysis. It is actually something I raised in the past as I feel my current workload exceeds no of hrs available.

A large portion of my time is spent on reading or sending emails. I can easily get number of emails for each day however I struggle to allocate timing to show the impact.

I was wondering if there is some sort of study or rule of the thumb I could use here so.my numbers make sense. Obviously some emails take 5sec whilst others 10min so I want to make sure my estimation is reasonable and ideally based on something other than my say so.

I'm not sure how an independent study will match with your email workload.
For example, I might get 80 emails a day, junk 20 so less than 5 seconds each, forward 30, file 10 and work on 20. Of the 20 I work on, some could take days, others could take an hour.
Then Joe Blogs receives 80 but he has to work on 50......

Surely a generic study will show you nothing.

You would be better having a system on a pad - time emails junked, time emails forwarded on, and then off the emails you deal with, time spent completing, add telephone calls received and made, meetings etc. And do this for a few weeks to get the average and to see which days are busier than others.

Takeaway_Addict

illusionek wrote: »

@mr_munchem

In order to improve my productivity I need to spend some time to identify where losses occur

@Diamandis

I was afraid this may be the only answer. It would be a proper pain in **** to do it, thats the reason I am looking for some independent study I could use as avg

But your employers won't accept other peoples work, they'll accept yours so if you want to analyse it then you need to do the leg work.

To not do so just seems a lazy way of trying to not do some aspects of your job.