PM ADVISORY:

Leveraging Email to Enhance Productivity

By Avinoam Nowogrodski
Co-founder and CEO
Clarizen

USA

There must be a better way to make email work for us. A study released earlier this year by Fonality [1] and research firm Webtorials [2] stated that workers spend more than half their day on email. This time is often spent doing necessary, yet unproductive tasks like scheduling meetings, updating teams on daily tasks, etc.

While we could suggest people spend less time using email, it’s hard to practice since email is central to the way we communicate. The better alternative is to make email more productive. If workers spent more time in email, but that time was strategic or more useful towards achieving daily successes – that would be ideal. Email has been driving communication in business for years now, but a lesser-known fact is that you can use email to enhance productivity significantly.

So how do businesses turn email from just a communications tool into a productivity tool — one that can be used as the central dashboard to manage and complete work each day? The answer is approaching an inbox using three strategies: information management, contact management and work & project management.

Information Management

Inboxes can be an abyss, especially if you’re using it as a repository for files and information you might find handy later. To avoid this pitfall, workers need to manage their information and prioritize it, but this doesn’t mean using folders, tasks lists or flags. There are companies currently on the market that offer information management platforms [3] that sit on top of email or other communication tools like instant messenger, address books and calendars. These platforms help connect general information, potential customers, partners, vendors, decision makers or outside experts. They can also provide searchers on keyword, skills, companies and decision makers. Many of these platforms include email functionality that also prioritizes inboxes, which helps deliver relevant and timely emails to users in a streamlined fashion.

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To read entire paper (click here)

About the Author Avinoam Nowogrodski Author Avinoam Nowogrodski is co-founder and CEO of Clarizen, the SaaS-based work execution software company.  Avinoam Nowogrodski brings over 20 years of experience in sales, engineering and business management to Clarizen. He brings insight and expertise gained in those positions to Clarizen's vision of bringing collaborative project management to every business.  Prior to establishing Clarizen, Avinoam co-founded SmarTeam Corporation, a leading provider of collaborative product life cycle management (PLM) solutions.  As CEO from 1995 – 2005, Avinoam's leadership molded SmarTeam into a leading enterprise PLM solution which was sold and supported by IBM. In 1999 SmarTeam was acquired by Dassault Systemes (DS) and Avinoam served on the DS General Executive Management team for 6 years. At his departure from the company, SmarTeam had 3,500 customers across diverse industries and over 100,000 users worldwide.  Avinoam Nowogrodski holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University, Israel.  To contact Mr. Nowogrodski, send email to zinnia.gill@horngroup.com. Clarizen online project management software allows users to update tasks, contribute to projects, report issues and generally tie together related communications using any email client. With this innovation, users simply send an email to their projects within the software and the updates are made without having to log in. This makes work & project management and execution easier, and users spend less time providing updates via email since everything is already laid out in the project management software.   http://www.clarizen.com/