Growing need to manage the office email overload
Well, you are not alone. Research by polling firm Mori suggests that the more senior you get, the more likely you are to be swamped by electronic messages.
Anecdotal evidence is even more striking. 'I know someone who on his first day in a greenfield job at a big investment bank had 200 emails waiting for him,' says Hilary Jackson of the City Personnel Group.
Love it or hate it, email has become a significant part of most people's working lives, and dealing with it efficiently is now an essential workplace skill.
Many at the top still use the traditional human filter for handling incoming emails - their secretaries. 'I receive thousands a month and I'm ashamed to say I ask my secretary to print out the most important ones and delete the trash. The rest I click through at my leisure,' says Grahame Cook, global head of equity capital markets at WestLB Panmure.
The less protected devise a host of strategies to deal with the traffic. One obvious move is to be ruthless with unsolicited email: 'I follow up on any junk email and get myself off the list straight away,' says Naomi Feinstein, an employment law partner with Lovells in the City of London.
Feinstein says that as clients have turned to email as their primary form of communication with lawyers, 'my job has become dealing with email'.
She is meticulous in her use of folders and sub-folders to organise and store messages and in using 'out of office' messages to indicate when she is away.
Beware of websites that require you to subscribe, says Jackson. Many will automatically put you on a mailing list in response. Deleting obsolete or superfluous messages is also vital, both to keep your inbox in order and to stop the company server becoming overloaded. 'I've got a week's worth in the trash and that's 400 emails,' Feinstein says.
As a senior manager, it pays to set a culture of minimum email use within your company or team. A huge proportion of unnecessary email traffic, especially in large, multinational organisations, is internal.
This can be anything from adverts for puppies for sale to promised pictures of Anna Kournikova and CCs of messages between subordinates.
However, being reticent is not always the right solution.
Ian Perham, a director of the management consultancy City Consultants, says: 'It's very difficult in a rapidly changing environment to benchmark what does and doesn't need to be communicated. But it's better to err on the side of email overload.'
It's worth remembering that group requests for help, while theoretically a great idea, rarely work in practice.
'If you ask for help from 20 people, everyone assumes the other 19 will respond. But they don't,' says Neil Matthews, partner in the corporate department at the law firm Eversheds.
