Cut t ing t he Clut ter

The endless round of meetings and emails is preventing us actually getting any work done Wake up. Roll over. Check emails. Get up. Join commute. Arrive at work. Check emails. Meeting. Another meeting. Sneakily reply to emails during the boring bits. Co

IF THIS SOUNDS a bit like your work day, you’re not alone. When email after unnecessary email, followed by meeting after dreary meeting, followed by interruption after annoying interruption boycotts your job description, you wonder why on earth you bothered with five years of uni-induced hard yakka.

As US software entrepreneur Jason Fried aptly puts it, modern offices aren’t centres of creativity and productivity anymore; they’re “interruption factories.”

“A busy office is like a food processor - it chops your day into tiny bits,” Fried says in his book Remote. Each bit is a meeting, a conference call, 24 emails to respond to, a weekly debrief, another meeting, until suddenly it’s time to go home – then come back and do it all over again tomorrow.

“It’s incredibly hard to get meaningful work done when your work day has been shredded into work moments.”

Matt Lawrence works in commercial banking, and reckons he spends roughly 80% of his 9- 5 day dealing with emails. “Outlook owns me – but I’d be screwed without it. I start a new role in a month which will be roughly 80% work and only 20% emails, because I’m getting an assistant to manage my admin.”

Bain & Company, a global consultancy company, estimates that the average manager in 2014 receives a whopping 30,000 emails a year, compared to a much more manageable 1,000 messages back in 1970. Unless the manager

Four tips for de-cluttering your day

in question is an Email Sender and Receiver Executive, he’s probably not very effective.

Nick O’Neill, GrabOne’s national sales manager, used to get up to 400 emails a day.

“I reduced the number of emails I received by stopping sending emails. If you send an email with four people CCed in, you’re going to get at least four emails back.

“I found that I got stuck in an inbox world, when really I could just get up, walk over and talk to someone about it, and get a much better result from it straight away.”

So, are you getting too many emails? We should probably have a meeting about it … Or should we? Bain & Company also discovered that a sample of managers in big US firms spent roughly 15% of their time in meetings, a share that has risen consistently since 2008. And the higher up the ladder you climb, the worse it gets.

“15%? That’s probably a bit light,” says O’Neill. “I attend about three meetings a day, not including conference calls and impromptu meetings that pop up all the time. When I schedule meetings, I have to give my staff a ‘what’s in it for me’. I take after my old boss who, if you weren’t getting to the point, would just pack up and leave.”

If you don’t get your work done during working hours, when will you? Tomorrow? Not if tomorrow looks anything like today.

“I like my job, but I often find I have too much to get through during the day,” says marketing executive Zoe Neave. “I’m also a mum, and I don’t want to pull the female card but sometimes I just want to go home and see my baby. I don’t want to go home to work – and I don’t want to feel guilty about it.” AFTER HOURS BELONG TO YOU