Are you surviving the e-maelstrom?
By Nick Easen for CNN
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Keeping e-mails as reminders can clog up your in box.
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(CNN) -- The arrival of e-mail in the mid 1990s was heralded as a new era of office communication, with promises efficiency and speed.
Yet nearly 10 years on, the white-collar worker can easily drown under a torrent of messages.
Sorting out e-mails can suck hours out of a working day -- just ask anyone who returns to their desk after the holidays only to find their in box bursting at the seams.
"You know in today's business world if you get behind in your e-mail you fall out of touch very quickly," Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Computers told CNN.
E-mail and in box management has probably become the number one office skill.
The fact is that the average employee spends 25 percent of the workday on e-mail -- which is equivalent to one hour 47 minutes.
While as many as eight percent spend as many as four hours a day dealing with mail, according to a survey by the American Management Association.
"The volume of e-mail or other electronic forms of communication is certainly escalating," says Ashley Friedlein of E-consultancy, a service for business professionals.
Although e-mail still remains cost-effective when compared to phone, video-conferencing or fax, it is far from free in terms of man-hours spent on it.
Christina Cavanagh, author of "Managing Your E-Mail: Thinking Outside the In box," believes that by reducing low-value and excess e-mail traffic, companies can save money.
According to her Web site, as much as 45 percent of e-mails have no or low-relevance and e-mails have overtaken their original usefulness as just another way to communicate.
Before you send your next e-mail thanking a work colleague for the thank you e-mail they just sent you -- think again. Friedling believes it is all about self-discipline.
"There is a danger because it is easy to send e-mails that people do not take seriously enough," he says.
"People do not put the same sort of thought, planning and quality control measures in place as you would for other forms of communication."
Few of us have formally learned how to write effective e-mails and manage them, but Friedling believes corporate investment will grow in this area.
"People use it as a way of handing over their responsibilities. They say: 'Oh well I sent you that e-mail,' rather than actually going to see someone or following it up," he says.
"If you are tempted to look at e-mails instead of doing an unpleasant task, do the task first and look at them as a reward. Delete as many e-mails as you can and ask yourself -- do I need to keep this?"
-- CNN's Meara Erdozain contributed to this story
