productivity

Break the Email Habit

Why Communication Will Soon Look Very Different

When Email Is a Full Time Job

If answering your email feels like a full time job, you’re not alone. The average knowledge worker spends 2-3 hours a day answering email, at a significant cost in productivity to companies. Large companies have tried to address the issue from the top down: Thierry Breton, the head of major French systems integrator ATOS banned all email across the company’s 76,000 employees. Many companies continue the search for alternatives. There have been a host of proposals for what individuals can do to help. The proponents of the Email Charter have drawn up a list of twelve best practices they asked everyone to adopt toward doing away with the common blight of email overload. Among them:
  • Spare the CC’s: they multiply “like mating bunnies” and clutter everyone’s inbox
  • Cut contentless responses: “Thanks for your note” is empty and better left unsent

Email Habits Are Hard To Break

Take brevity, for example: Long-winded explanations, justifications, and even social niceties (“Hi Max. How have you been?”) take valuable time to write and to read. For the most part, a person reading your email just wants to know: What is expected of me right now? Most people are afraid to just get to the point for fear they might seem rude. But as journalist Jordan Crook famously pointed out:

“If everyone were to cut out all the niceties, everyone would be a bitch. But if everyone did it, no one would be a bitch. And right now, everyone is a bitch. Email’s bitch.”

 Pyrus Can Help

Pyrus was designed with one principle in mind: get items out of your inbox as quickly as possible so you can focus on real work. To that end, some of the basic Pyrus features include: Read more

Posted on 3 min read

A Tool Your Sales Team Will Love

Pyrus Automates Sales Workflows (and More)

Pyrus is a versatile communication platform for teamwork that can be easily adapted to the needs of every department in your organization. This week we focus on how it can make life easier for your entire sales team.

1. Every Inbound Lead is a Task

Communication in Pyrus centers on tasks, and your inbound leads are no exception.

Pyrus automatically converts incoming inquiries emailed to a designated address such as sales@yourcompany.com into actionable tasks for your sales reps to tackle. Any attachments on the original email are copied over into the new task. Created tasks can be programmatically assigned to a workflow based on the type of inquiry coming in. Read more

Posted on 4 min read

Pyrus Integrates With Android Wear

Now Get Things Done on the Go

Pyrus is now the first productivity platform to integrate with Android Wear. That means you can Get Things Done (#GTD) anywhere and everywhere from your new smartwatch.

You can respond to, approve, reject, or complete a pending task right from your wrist. New tasks that arrive to your Pyrus inbox show up instantly on your LG G Watch or Samsung Gear Live as notifications. You can view the full content of a task on your watch and take action immediately. If the task needs a response or approval, you can do so right on the watch interface. Or if you prefer to deal with the task later, just swipe it away. Read more

Posted on 1 min read

Over-Tasked and Under-Organized?

3 Reasons Your Team Can’t Get Things Done

Email Inbox Chaos

Your email inbox is a mess: countless unread messages, email threads that end with a meaningless “OK” with no clear sense of what should happen next, and irrelevant CC’d message threads you can’t unsubscribe from. If that is true of your own inbox, chances are the rest of your team is also suffering. Read more

Posted on 2 min read

The History of Email

From Groundbreaking Communication To Workplace Agony

The Dark Ages

Before connectivity among different computers – what we think of as the internet – messages could only be sent to different users of the same computer. Programmer Raymond Tomlinson is credited with inventing email around 1971 when he may or may not have sent “QWERTYUIOP” as the first network electronic message. He was the first to connect his computer to his mailbox by using an “@” symbol.

Email Comes Out of the Shadows

=&2=& The word “email” was first coined in 1982. By 1985, the typical users of email were government and military employees, and students and academic professionals. Email became mainstream with the advent of free email providers like Hotmail and Yahoo in the 1990’s. Suddenly everyone wanted at least one email address, and the number of email users worldwide jumped from millions to hundreds of millions.

Email’s Maturity

By 1997, email had become big business. Microsoft purchased Hotmail for approximately $400 million. In 2003, the 77 million workers who used a computer at work said they most commonly used it to access the internet and check email. In 2012 there were more than 3 billion email accounts across the globe, and approximately 294 billion emails were sent per day. In the US, 90 million Americans accessed email through a mobile device, with 64% doing so on a regular basis. =&4=&

The Age of Unwilling Readers

Tom Van Vleck, an internet pioneer, said he was

“mighty displeased” Read more

Posted on 3 min read

10,000 Unread Emails

Back in March Apple released a new update to its iOS 7.1. Among the accompanying one-page release notes it published on the occasion was the following line:

This line is remarkable for what it implies about email usage: that there are enough people out there who have 10,000 unread emails. Enough of those users noticed the bug and brought it to Apple’s attention. Presumably, Apple fixes thousands of minor bugs in between releases, yet this one made it to the main release summary, prominently featured as a major fix. Read more

Posted on 2 min read