Start Fighting Back Against Emails!

I just wanted to share an another excellent article from 43folders with you. Merlin quotes a new article from the New York Times about how organisations are finally starting to realise how big a drag on productivity emails and instant messaging have become.

Merlin asks the most pertinent question possible: “What does a company get out of its employees spending half their day using an email program?"

In many ways the most shocking stat is this:

"A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times…"

However, you also need to think about the overall productivity as this infographic shows. In total we spend 48% of our working hours either in meetings or being interrupted by things that are neither important nor urgent. If I spent 4 hours of my time everyday either checking my Blackberry or being in meetings I would never get anything done!

It just goes to show the importance of working in a structured way and perhaps taking some inspiration from the Importance/Urgency Quadrant proposed by Stephen Covey, A. Roger Merrill and Rebecca Merill in First Things First.

This has been adapted into a version for how to handle emails over at The Productivity Blog, where you will also be able to find inspiration for other ways of increasing your personal productivity. The article is one that I wrote some time ago and is based on the principles of the Time Manager® productivity tool, just updated for the 21st century.

Head on over to 43folders for the full low-down and Merlin's very relevant thoughts in his excellent commentary that I completely agree with.

Will "Jott" Help Break the Curse of the Crackberry?

Living in Europe, it's sometimes hard not to be envious of the technologies that are available to consumers and businesses in other parts of the world. One of the greatest examples of technology being used to increase productivity in recent years is Jott, which is currently only available in the US.

For those of you who don't yet know what Jott is, it's a service that transcribes speech into text allowing you the luxury of having a virtual PA. The service allows you to receive and read your emails on a Blackberry (or any other supported device) and then respond using your voice. Within about ten minutes your voice reply is transcribed into text and the email is sent. This means that if you're on the go you can even dictate notes and reminders to yourself and have them sent to you - thereby doubling up as a dictaphone. From what I hear the voice recognition is very precise and works well in North America.

Its greatest strength, however, is also its greatest weakness as developing voice recognition software for various markets is incredibly costly and difficult. At Eckoh, one of Europe's leading providers of voice recognition software for phone services, they identified more than 600 dialects and accents of English in Britain alone. Therefore it is highly doubtful that these services will ever make it across the pond in any form that is useful to European users. Just look at all of the software packages for PC that promise voice recognition. Some years ago I tried buying Dragon Naturally Speaking, but I could never get it to recognise my words as I don't have an American accent.

If you are in the US, however, I would definitely recommend giving Jott a go.

Visit Jott or read more about Jott and Blackberries. You can also read more about how you can use Jott for your personal notes at Gina Trapani's excellent Lifehacker blog.