This is an older story I came across that I think has some interesting insights to offer. I don’t usually read USA Today, but I thought this piece had some great facts about how people read email, and especially how people with public emails addresses or really famous people deal with thousands of emails a day.
Some excerpts:
E-mail is twice as likely as the phone to be used to communicate at work, says a recent survey by software company Oracle. More than half — 53% — of respondents say their productivity decreases when they’re away from e-mail. One-third of chief information officers (the folks who keep corporate e-mail systems running) say losing an e-mail system for a week would be more traumatic than getting divorced, a survey by computer storage company Veritas says.
One method: Don’t read it
Amazingly, there are leaders who believe the best way to deal with e-mail is to ignore it. Bernie Ebbers, deposed CEO of WorldCom, refused to read or answer e-mail. Earlier this year, Burger King’s then-CEO John Dasburg told USA TODAY about e-mail messages: “I don’t read them because you just get stacks and stacks of them.” Dasburg resigned in March to become chairman of package-delivery company DHL Airways.
Topping them all is Gov. Tom Vilsack, D-Iowa. Under pressure recently from The Des Moines Register to disclose information contained in certain e-mails, he professed his ignorance. “I am 52 years old, and I don’t know much about technology,” he said. “I don’t read my e-mails. E-mails are printed off — some of them, not all of them — for me to read.”
Most chief executives do not endorse Vilsack’s method of e-mail control.
Even if none of the big shots has found a complete solution, their methods can be instructive. Here are some of them:
An assistant. The public seems to assume that an e-mail sent to any well-known person gets sifted first by someone else. In truth, most high-profile people interviewed for this article said they read all their e-mail.
John Doerr does it differently. As a partner at venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, he helped fund some of technology’s hottest start-ups, including Netscape Communications. He gets 100 to 150 e-mails a day.
“Biggest improvement in e-mail handling and responsiveness is to have an exceptional executive assistant screen all incoming e-mail,” Doerr says — in an e-mail. His assistant, Angela Valles, responds to strangers, deletes spam, schedules meetings and moves personal e-mail into a folder marked “to read/reply asap.”
No single rule about assistants seems to apply. JetBlue’s Neeleman reads most of his e-mail but responds to only 5% to 10% of it. A personal assistant replies or forwards the rest.
Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of America Online and principal owner of the Washington Capitals hockey team, receives more than 300 e-mails a day and answers all of them himself. “My life is a constant quest for white space in my mail reader folder,” he says. Source: USA Today via TechDirt
I don’t usually cut and paste news without writing my own commentary and opinion on the topic, but today I was reading about a new “wave and go” credit card technology and this posting on TechDirt hit the nail on the head. Couldn’t have said it any better myself:
Great, now I can create a wish list and then buy even more stuff all from my easy chair. 
By Alice Hill
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