Blogs

Green Office Week – stop email overload

Wednesday May 16th, 2012, 12:55 pm

Its Green Office Week this week and stopping email overload is one way to make a very significant contribution to reducing your carbon foot print.

Green Email Usage

If your office and desk space was awash with papers you wouldn’t just go and ask for a new desk/larger office. You would be forced to clear up. Yet with email most people tend to ignore the warnings about mailbox sizes. Old emails are simply moved to another destination (for Outlook users often a pst file) and the inbox allowed to overflow again.

Unlike paper we can not see our emails, but make no mistake the more emails the more energy needed to process them. Even if you opt for email archiving to reduce the storage requirements, servers and energy is still needed to process them.

The main suppliers of email like Google, Microsoft and BT all promote large inboxes as an advantage. In my book this is amoral as it increases our carbon foot print and encourgaes email overload. It’s akin to the banks lending to people who could not aford to repay the loan. Instead of promoting bloated inboxes, responsible email providers should be promoting and rewarding those who downsize and maintain small sustainable inboxes.

Many business are now downsizing their office space to reduce overheads and be more sustainable. We should be doing the same with email to reduce our carbon foot prints. For example, reduce the volume of traffic through our inbox by reducing the number of emails chains, better email etiquette, sharing rather than sending the complete file.

During the week I will tweet more tips on how going green can also help you stop email overload.

For more ways to save time and reduce email overload by why not join on one of our Brilliant Email masterclasses or webinars?Dr Monica Seeley, founder of Mesmo Consultancy has spent the last fifteen years coaching and training people from a wide range of organisations and businesses to use email more effectively to improve personal and business performance and manage the risk associated with cyber crime. Monica is a Visiting Senior Fellow at Cass Business School City University and Bournemouth University Business School. She is passionate about helping people to save time by using email effectively and has written several books on the subject, the latest being Brilliant Email. She runs regular workshops and masterclasses on email best practice.

For more time saving tips and hints why not buy a copy of one of our books or let us run a Smart Email Management workshop for you and your colleagues.

Tags: BT, email chains, email etiquette, email overload, empty inbox, green office week, Microsoft

One response to “Green Office Week – stop email overload”

shredding San Antonio says:
May 22, 2012 at 2:56 am
It is true that web emails can also get overpopulated. Keeping your inbox neat and organized without the excess is like getting your job half-done and prepared for the future.