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One of the major side effects of email overload (and email addiction) is that we sit for hours at our desk which then impinges on our well-being. In this month’s guest blog from Simon Lesser of BourneFit, Simon looks at the impact on our well-being and gives us some top tips to how to improve this and our work-life balance.
Working is a necessity, particularly working behind a computer for many of us. This may be a large part of the day often extending upwards of 6-8 hours allowing for the occasional tea and biscuit. Here are some top tips on improving posture daily and hence reducing chance of RSI, neck pain and round back posture.
There are a number of simple thing we can do but initially let’s look at what can happen…….
Shocking, and he’s supposed to be a fitness professional !
We can notice a number of things.
So let’s see what simple improvements can be made……
Much better!
Maintaining your well-being (in-spite of email overload)
About Simon Lesser and BourneFit
Simon Lesser is founder and owner of BourneFit a Bournemouth based fitness and sport therapy business. For more information click visit the BourneFit website. There you will also information of healthy eating and other ways to improve your well-being and maintain a good work-life balance.
Tags: BourneFit, email addiction, email overload, Simon Lesser, well being
Here are our top five tips to help you relax and reduce the risk of cyber crime happening to either you or your business for example, identity theft, denial of service, loss of sensitive data and home burglary etc. The key is to disconnect but if you find that hard then be discrete about what you say and post.
For some more suggestions on how reduce email overload overload and to take time our from the digital world and especially from email click here to see my latest blog on Huffington.co.uk. The article also contains ways to re-balance your work-life balance and reduce stress.
If all else fails you might want to check your level of email addiction click here to start. At Mesmo Consultancy have helped may business people reduce their level of email addiction and improve their work-life balance. Call us for an informal discussion about how we can help you.
Tags: cyber crime, email addiction, email overload, Huffington.co.uk, Mesmo Consultancy
I chose to disconnect last week whilst on leave. No email, no social media. Running the business (and me) was delegated to our very able Administrator. We agreed a process to minimise the post vacation email overload. Rules were set before leaving to folder all known lower priority emails (eg newsletters).
Meeting request would tentatively accepted. How often have you as a PA spent time arranging meetings in bosses absence and they return and have different priorities. One executive once said he felt his PA saw her role as filling up his diary with meetings which he and she then had to 
undo as his priorities changed. How often does that happen to you when on leave? Used in this context ‘tentative’ takes on a new and useful function.
Otherwise, If something was ultra-urgent we agreed she would call/text me.
On the second day sitting having pre-dinner drinks how did I feel watching the three others all with their heads in their iPhones and Blackberrys? Certainly not left out. Rather the reverse: included in the here and now and able to people watch and enjoy the gentle lapping of the waves as I relaxed and stayed calm. I can only image this must be what it’s like for a reformed alcoholic watching others drink whilst they nurse a lemonade.
A huge plus was the extra time to read instead of feeling I should decamp early from the pool and go and deal with the day’s email tsunami. The book was recommended by a colleague. I wanted to email and say how wonderful it was. But what value did it add for either of us? Had I done so there would have been an email chain which wasted both our times and added to the email overload.
Knowing the business was in safe hands was a wonderful feeling. Although one worry was that my personal emails come in on my work address. It is worth separating business and pleasure, but as Steve Jobs famously said he had only one email address. I make this work for me too. There is a Hotmail address but that is only used for signing up for white paper and special offers etc. None of which is life changing if not read for a week.
What of my social diary – golf matches and alike? Our Administrator dealt with any that looked like they required a response. So no lost golf games or party opportunities! Two years ago such arrangements were nearly all done by phone. Now of course it’s email, although some friends (and relatives) say they still prefer to talk. In some ways social engagements were better managed as there was time to think and consider instead of feeling one must make an instant response.
I was tempted to log in during the week and join in when everyone else had their heads in their iPhones etc, but a glass of whisky and the urge evaporated. After all having delegated, what would that say about the trust placed in our Administrator? Furthermore, why did I want to disrupt my calm mind. Also, previously I have made poor decisions when in holiday mode through lack of context and having all the necessary information to hand.
At the airport again the urge to hit connect welled up. As in my previous blogs my advice for dealing with the holiday email tsunami is talk before checking the email to prioritise and save trawling through stuff which does not merit your immediate attention. In my case it would be talk and read the ‘read me first email’ as my first day back in the UK was Saturday. I was two hours ahead of the UK so my briefing email would not be ready until we were in the air. Some food and drink soon took away the urge to log in.
On my return as expected, the junk had been trashed and the remaining messages prioritised.
Not logging in was as to paraphrase the great Diana Athill ‘ like excess cargo which needed to be dumped’. I came back feeling more relaxed and able to see the big picture again. Also an a huge bonus, no post holiday email overload and it was very easy to reach inbox zero on day one of my return.
Of those in the party that did log on. One person was asked why they did so when the manager did not? One said they were paid to be available to their clients at all times and yes, someone did want to meet them on Monday. Could it have waited? Probably yes. Did I miss email, twitter etc? No. In fact it has left me re-assessing the value of some of these tools.
What is your experience of no email days/weeks when on leave?
Tags: email addiction, email free vacation, email management training, email overload, inbox zero
We are publishing the 100th edition of the Mesmo Consultancy ‘e-briefing’ – tips and hints on how to save time by reducing email overload and using brilliant email etiquette. The first edition appeared on 1st January 2003 and was emailed to 350 subscribers. 100 editions on and we have over 2,300 subscribers.
How has email changed over the last ten years since the first edition?
SPAM dominated discussion on email. There were government conferences on it. Company boards were blamed as they did not recognise the need to take control and enforce proper Acceptable Usage Policies. In 2011 the resources needed to process the current volume of SPAM are sufficient to drive 1.6 million times around the world.
Phones4U made headlines as employees were banned from using email for internal communication and their MD said this would save them £1M per year. Here we go again in 2012 with Atos trying to find alternatives to email for internal communications.
Royal Mail found that poor business etiquette was costing companies £4bn in lost customers. Poor email etiquette is now just as costly judging from some of our clients’ woes.
The Audit Commissioners found that IT fraud and abuse was posing major problems to public sector organisations. New technologies, like the use of handheld devices (PDAs) and wireless networking, are creating fresh risks to which public services are only slowly reacting.
There was a rise in the sales of traditional writing instruments according to research analysts. One teacher was so fed up with text speak that she ordered her pupils to write only with a fountain pen.
Hands up all those who still use a fountain pen – especially to say ‘thank you’?
Email overload and time wasted on the Internet were starting to become an issue. A Government survey estimated that people wasted two days per year ‘wilfing’ – aimlessly surfing the net. Now we estimate business people waste up to nearly two days per month dealing with unnecessary email.
Email addiction is becoming a problem for Blackberry users. In 2011 the Blackberry outage served to highlight just how serious email addiction has now become. It is one of the biggest drains on employee’s health and causes of stress related illness.
Twitter takes off and we launched our daily email tips under the EmailDoctor pseudonym. Some were starting to suggest that the use of email would decline in the face of rising use of social networking. See Social Networking in Business 2009.
Email overload continues to dominate the news with some declaring email bankruptcy. Cyber crime costs more than physical crime. There are an estimated 2M emails sent per second worldwide. In personal terms it equates to about 72 email messages received per person per day which is about one new email every ten minutes! Now research analysts estimate a rise to 80+ by 2015.
There are now several websites dedicated to reviewing conventional note books and writing instruments!
Does history repeat itself? Yes, just like fashion, where drain pipe trousers are succeed by flairs and then straight cuts and then back around the loop. Mini skirts come and go and for some they were called ‘pelmets’. In suits it’s double breasted then single breasted are all the rage.
Indeed for some of us of a certain age ‘Cloud Computing’ feels just like ‘Bureau Services’. Ah but many of you are far too young to have heard that term.
So hold onto a few of these challenges and make a diary not about how you resolved them because you may well need to look back in anger five years down the line!
Tags: email addiction, email and the cloud, email best practice, email carbon footprint, email etiquette, email overload
Dear Blackberry users – isn’t it time to assess your email addiction? Email addiction is a major cause of email overload. Are you feeling stressed out by the lack of your instant quick fix of emails? Feeling you can no longer function properly and worse still do business (as some people are reporting). This is all nonsense.
This Blackberry outage should be a wake-up call for us all to reassess just how addicted we have become to email, because we can all survive without constant instant access to our email 24x7x365. We would probably be significantly more productive. We just like to think its macho and makes us look important to be attached by the Blackberry (or iphone) umbilical cord to our email.
The lack of constant interruptions from the Blackberry buzz could have many positive effects such as reigniting our strategic thinking and improving meetings as people stop multi-tasking. We could start to review some processes which have developed through our email addiction rather than as a result of thinking through what is best for the business.
To check just how addicted you and your business have become use our Email Addiction benchmarking tool. Click here to download it. For a ten point plan to cure it see January 31st – Email addiction ways to cure it and February 2nd – Email addiction – more tips and hints.
Whatever you do, just make sure you seize the moment to re-evaluate your life-work balance and how you can actually be more productive by freeing yourself from the the Blackberry umbilical cord.
Tags: email addiction, email overload