Unsubscribe, Mute, Block – What Did I Miss?

We spending far too much time on messages, email & chats & it is affecting performance which is supported by the data below.

Individuals can spend up to 30% or 2.5 hrs per day of their working time on messages & the problem is increasing.
Translate 30% of time into 30% of salary costs to read & send messages & that’s a real potential performance drain?
21% of emails are checked within their first hour of receiving them – chats are even more instantaneous & demanding.
All of this is leading to individuals checking messages up to an astonishing 75X a day! What a performance drain.
Messaging is the single most time-consuming activity in work life today alongside meetings.

The increased use of email & chat messaging is challenging communication overload in many organisations:

The instant demand of reply’s & requests.
The time spent trying to manage it.
The sheer quantity of it.
At times the lack of clarity in the message.

Email & Chats are recognised as the Number 1 time waster for individuals & teams – you will see why below! It’s not a tomorrow challenge – its real today.

There are ~4 billion active email users, expected to climb to 4.5bn in 2024.
Online business chat & collaboration platforms are the fastest growing sector of communication.
Closing in on 2 billion users today & growing rapidly.
Chat statistics are evolving, what we do know is their use is compounding time pressure in addition to email.
We are spending & wasting more time distracted in inboxes than ever before.
Individuals can receive up to 120-250+ messages a day.

The quantity is just part of the challenge – it’s the time taken to manage the quantity.

Pause & reflect on the trends & numbers for a moment & what this may look like for yourself & your team?

A popup in the context of messaging is used as an alert to inform people they have a new message.

Chat mechanisms use popups as strategies to ensure their messages get read. People feel obligated to reply to the message, so they log onto the chat or email platform – the ultimate goal of the popup.

The rise of instant communication relies on capturing the attention of the reader. Whether it’s instantaneous communication with family and friends via chat systems such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger etc or the more recent phenomenon and challenge at work!

In recent years the number of messaging and chat systems has ballooned with more than 3 billion people using messaging systems and apps.

The biggest impact however is the instantaneous nature – the speed at which a response is sought and the increased expectation that the message has been read, promptly.

The increase in chat systems, has seen chart platforms adopt different strategies to capture the reader’s attention to support this.

Purely designed to capture readers attention, create an instant need for a response and have users spend more time in the chat collaboration platform.

Recently, on a few straw polls with colleagues – we asked why do you use chats vs emails?

The response: If I need to capture their attention and get them to do something straight away I send a chat vs an email – I have more success with a chat.

Popups are a major distraction.

They compound the pressure to read the message.
They build a level of curiosity – I received a message – what’s in it?
Popups are designed to grab your attention and distract you.
They are designed for you to feel obligated to reply to the message.

The distraction will break your state of workflow and research shows can take up to 23 minutes for you to refocus on what you were doing beforehand.

Leaders need to recognise the negative impact email and chat popups have on their team. Serving to waste only time and money.

What can leaders do to solve the problem?

The main goal is to limit and thereby reduce the number of messages employees and leaders receive. How can this be achieved?

Unsubscribing

Unsubscribing is to cancel a subscription to an electronic mailing list or online service.

Muting

Muting is to temporarily prevent popup alerts and notifications from specific chats, emails and apps being sent to your smartphone.

Blocking

Blocking is to permanently prevent popups and notifications from specific, chats and apps being sent to your smartphone.

Hiding

This is when you prevent yourself from seeing certain chats and conversations.

Marking as spam

This is when you label incoming messages or emails because they are unsolicited messages sent in bulk which you did not want to receive.

Deleting

Deleting is removing data from a computer’s memory, this could be in the form of chats and email from your smartphone or computer.

Marking as Junk

Similarly, to spam, marking as junk his is when you label incoming messages or emails because they are unsolicited messages sent in bulk which you did not want to receive.

The decision is up to you, do you want to as the leader learn how to reduce time wasting from email and chats?

Use the long list of options available to help reduce the number of chats & emails you receive.

What did we miss – what else do you do to limit messages?

At Creating Edge, we understand the challenge, we have lived it & wanted to ensure we could help leaders overcome the challenges for you & your team.

Our online Email & Chat course is full of opportunities to address the messaging challenge has been written with the leader in mind:

Maximise performance for yourself & your team.

Don’t delay get started today.

Unsubscribe, Mute, Block – What Did I Miss?