In an article by the Sydney Morning Herald, a study done by Dr. Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University in England, found that “it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train if thought after interruption by email…So people who check their email every five minutes waste 8.5 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.” While most people claim to check their email every 15 minutes, when actually studied, the average user actually checked their email every five minutes.
Email is one of the main distractions TechnoEsq speaks to law offices about when consulting for productivity purposes. Statistics like the one above are actually conservative and do not take into account the time taken to go through user’s Inbox. A lot of users have upwards of 500 emails in their Inbox which contributes to a huge amount of stress as more emails continues to come in.
Due to this massive distraction and stress inducing overflow of data, TechnoEsq advocates law firms institute Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero which we previously posted here. If you haven’t instituted Inbox Zero in your legal practice, stop what you are doing and watch Merlin’s video below. Come back to this post after a week of using this method and post your comments.