The root cause of stress and work-related exhaustion does not come from what is happening in our external environment, but how we respond to it from our internal landscape; more specifically – from how our mind reacts to what we are experiencing and the extent to which we are able to effectively manage our mind, or not.

It’s easy to spend a large portion of your working day just trying to make a dent in your email backlog, to the detriment of other, often more pressing, priorities. With the average worker spending 13 hours a week dealing with emails, businesses are potentially losing up to 28% of work time to email admin.

Here are four strategies that might help you to reduce this burden, improve productivity and streamline internal communication.

Let’s face it: there are many unsolved challenges in today’s business communication. But luckily, there are many ways and tools to keep it productive and organized as well. In this article, we’ve put together the most reliable approaches to avoid plunging into talkative chaos at work.

An infographic about email overload and its solutions. Each and every day, 193.3 billion emails are sent around the world. More than half of those are business emails. The average person spends 28 percent of the workweek reading and responding to email, which equates to 13 hours a week. So what do we do about all this email dependence? Thankfully there are tools and strategies to cut down on inbox overload and get organized.

Reply All disasters can be avoided by adopting sound email etiquette and making sure everyone understands them. Using the email software too and looking outside the inbox to alternative technologies/medium can help manage the potential for such disasters.

One way to improve Email communication is always use your Spell Checker before sending. Unfortunately, some people rely on these tools too much, which can lead to big problems.

How many Emails do you receive where someone replies with only “OK” or “Thanks”? To solve this problem, institute the “NTN” (for “No Thanks Necessary” ) or “NTR” (for “No Thanks Required”) protocol in your team/department/company.

The key to exercising is that because it was something that I scheduled, it happened. The exact same goes for routines that you need to work into your workday, such as your Email triage sessions.

Our findings show that some patterns of email use are associated with lower perceived productivity and higher stress. The longer daily duration spent on email, the lower the assessed productivity and the higher the stress. With high email use, people who chose when to self-interrupt to deal with email, and “Batchers”, people who cluster email use, assessed their productivity higher at the end of the day compared to those who check email triggered by email notifications, and to those who check email consistently. To our knowledge, our study is the first in situ multi-method investigation of email activity, workplace outcomes and stress. Our results lay ground for future theoretical exploration of these effects, and provide valuable practical lessons for organizations and knowledge workers.

The web site of Dr. Monica Seeley, a veteran leader in the fight against email overload.