别让电子邮件偷走你的时间！

    如果想尝试令人不快的体验，可以读一下著名儿童图书《亚历山大和糟糕透顶的一天》（Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day）。亚历山大和家人去爸爸办公室接他，结果在那里制造了一大堆麻烦。但今天的读者感到最奇怪的应该是爸爸办公桌的插图。上面有电话、文件、书籍，但就是没有电脑，因为朱迪思•维奥斯特的这本书首次出版是在1972年。

    所以，我们知道，在1972年，上班族在电子邮件上不会花一丁点时间。然而，四十年过去了，如今，查看电子邮件已经成了工作的代名词，甚至似乎要成为我们工作生活的全部。

    2012年7月，麦肯锡全球研究所（McKinsey Global Institute）公布的“社交经济”报告中指出，普通知识型员工28%的上班时间都在处理电子邮件。如果你每周工作50个小时，则代表有14个小时花在了处理邮件上。麦肯锡的报告显示，通过充分利用社交协作平台，员工可以将处理电子邮件的效率提高25% - 30%，进而节省约7% - 8.5%的时间用于其他工作。但如果你所在的公司不打算在这类平台上花钱，本文将为提供一些可操作的方法，让你不至于在电子邮件上面花费那么多时间：

    1. 取消邮件订阅。

    电子邮件管理服务提供商Baydin分析了500万封电子邮件后发现，普通电子邮件用户平均每天收到147条信息，其中会删除71条（48%）。每删除一条平均需要3.2秒。听起来并不算多，也就是每天4分钟而已，但如果你每周工作时间删除350封邮件，则需要花费20分钟，全年累加起来超过16个小时。

    或许，我们可以换个角度来看：据“美国人时间使用情况调查”（American Time Use Survey）显示，孩子不满六岁的已婚在职父亲每天给孩子读书的时间平均仅有2.4分钟，还不到普通电子邮件用户用于删除电子邮件的时间。要想摆脱收件箱带给你的麻烦，就得取消你不会阅读的列表，停止订阅任何商业信息。

    2. 停止使用文件夹。

    卡耐基梅隆大学（Carnegie Mellon University）的一篇论文指出，32%的电子邮件用户同意一种说法：“只要读完的信息，我就会立即把它归类到文件夹中。”归类似乎很有效率，但Baydin公司CEO亚历克斯•摩尔认为，未来需要再次查找邮件时，你会发现，根据不同项目或联系人创建文件夹是效率最低的一种方式，即便是凭借自己对收件时间的模糊记忆，在收件箱中滚动查找的效率，也比之高出不少。如果你想清空收件箱，可以创建一个“归档”文件夹，但如果需要查找信息，则可以使用邮箱的搜索功能。

    If you'd like a jarring experience sometime, try reading the famous children's book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Alex and his family go pick up Dad at the office, causing all sorts of mischief, but what's strangest to the modern reader is the illustration of Dad's desk. He has a phone. Paper. Books. But, since Judith Viorst's story was first published in 1972, no computer.

    In 1972, you realize, office workers spent zero percent of their time on email. Forty years later, though, checking email has become synonymous with working, to the point where it seems to be taking over our working lives.

    According to a July 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report on "the social economy," the average knowledge worker now spends 28% of her work time managing email. If you work 50 hours per week, that's 14 hours stuck in the inbox. McKinsey's report suggested that workers could improve their email productivity by 25-30% through better use of social collaboration platforms, buying back 7-8.5% of their workweek. But even if your company isn't investing in such platforms, here's some low-hanging fruit for getting your head out of your inbox for a few of those 14 hours:

    1. Unsubscribe.

    According to an analysis of 5 million emails from Baydin, an email management service, the average email user gets 147 messages per day and deletes 71 (48%). Deletion takes an average of 3.2 seconds. That doesn't sound like much -- about 4 minutes per day -- but if you're deleting 350 emails per workweek, that takes around 20 minutes per week, which adds up to more than 16 hours per year.

    Or look at it this way: According to the American Time Use Survey, the average married, employed father who has children under age 6 spends just 2.4 minutes per day reading to them -- which is less time than the average email user spends deleting emails. Play offense with your inbox by getting yourself off any lists you don't read, and unsubscribing to commercial messages.

    2. Don't use folders.

    One paper from Carnegie Mellon University found that 32% of email users agree with the statement, "I file my messages into folders as soon as I have read them." Filing seems productive, but according to Alex Moore, CEO of Baydin, creating files associated with different projects or people is the least efficient way to find emails you might need again in the future -- less efficient, in fact, then scrolling back through your inbox trying to remember roughly when the needed email came in. You can create one "archive" folder if you like to keep your inbox empty, but use the search function to find any information you need.