办公室文化:别让电子邮件偷走你的时间

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.

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。

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.

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。

According to a July 2017 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:

2017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. Unsubscribe.

1. 取消邮件订阅。 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.

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。

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.

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. Don't use folders.

2. 停止使用文件夹。 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.

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。

3. Send email at the right time.

3. 在正确的时间发送电子邮件。

According to Baydin's analysis, the average email user writes 40 messages a day, but there's no point writing these emails if they don't get read. A message sent at 6 a.m. is more likely to be opened than one sent later in the day, Moore reports, though there's also a small bump in reading after lunch. "If you need to ask someone to do something, you're more likely to get what you want after their blood sugar is up," he says.

根据Baydin的分析，普通电子邮件用户每天会写40条信息，但如果没人读这些信息，它们就没有任何作用。比如，摩尔发现，早上六点钟发送的信息与之后任何时间发送的信息相比，被打开的几率更高。另外，午饭后也是阅读信息的一个小高潮期。他说：“如果你想请求某人做某事，在对方血糖升高之后，你便越有可能实现自己的目的。”

4. Don't check email so often.

4. 不要过于频繁查看电子邮件。 Peter Bregman, author of 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done, notes that there's a reason email management has grown from zero hours per week to 28% of a person's time in a generation. "Email is such a seductress in terms of distraction because it poses as valid work," he says. You're supposed to be working on a proposal, but you don't feel like working on the proposal, so you check your inbox. "If you could get away with watching TV, you probably would instead of writing that proposal, but you probably can't, so instead you check email," he says.

《18分钟法则：心无旁骛，做正确的事》（ 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done）一书的作者彼得•布雷格曼认为，仅仅经过一代人，处理电子邮件的时间便从零增长到占个人时间的28%，其中是有原因的。他说：“因为电子邮件造成一种有效工作的假象，所以特别容易让人分心。”比如，你本应该专心做提案，但你不想这么做。于是，你跑去查看自己的收件箱。他说：“如果看电视不被惩罚，你或许也会去看电视，而不是写提案。可是你看不了电视，于是你就跑去查看电子邮件了。”

A better solution? Batch process. Bregman checks three times per day, and finds this saves him many hours per week. "No one's ever complained they haven't gotten an email back fast enough," he says. If three checks per day won't work for you, try checking just once an hour instead, doing 40 minutes of focused work, then 20 minutes of inbox management. Chances are, you'll get a lot more done.

有更好的解决方法吗？有，那就是分批处理法。布雷格曼每天查看三次电子邮件，并且发现这种方式可以每周节省多个小时。他说：“从没人抱怨没有及时收到回信。”如果每天查看三次不适合，可以尝试每一个小时查看一次，集中精力工作40分钟，然后用20分钟处理收件箱。如此一来，你会发现自己的工作效率将会大大提高。