You have mail.

Everyone loves them and everyone hates them. Work emails, personal emails, joke emails, spam emails, latest offer emails and my favourite, chain emails, extolling the virtue of sending the message from the Dalai Lama onto your fifteen closest friends so peace and harmony will reign in your life along with a big cheque from the lottery office. All those emails you never read anymore, all those emails that seemed interesting the first time you subscribed and all those emails that still make you inbox sing every time they arrive. It has long been noted the amount of rubbish that lands in your inbox far exceeds anything relevant to you but what is the cost of getting rid of all that rubbish?

If everyone printed all of their spam and chain emails and then buried them in landfill, the world would not have enough trees for the paper, nor enough holes to take the load. Luckily with a swipe of your hand or a flick of your mouse, you eradicate the offending distraction to your busy work day, generally without even opening the emails. Depending on how many emails you get, surveys on such information indicate that anywhere from fifteen minutes to thirty minutes a day is used to hit the delete button if you receive more than sixty or seventy emails a day. With fifteen from the Dalai Lama alone, along with the latest Google updates on your name, those numbers are easily reached for most people.

At the upper limit of thirty minutes of distraction, collating the rubbish and hitting the delete button, you end up with seven days spent doing this meaningless task every year. Extrapolating that over a seventy five year life span, emails after all are for life, you get eighteen months just banging away on the delete button. You don't want to get to the pearly gates and wish you had another thirty minutes to clean up your emails do you?

Sure fifteen minutes or even thirty minutes doesn't seem much, in a day crammed with waiting in line at banks or sandwich shops at lunchtime, coffee runs in the morning so the marketing department can function properly or Facebooking you latest night out. People aren't optimised into law firm time segments, they aren't good at measuring their work flow efficiencies and as such, the slow creep of time in small increments of inconsequential key board strokes, doesn't seem to matter much.

It can't matter, otherwise we'd spend that fifteen to thirty minutes a day doing sit ups, walking the dog, writing our memoirs, saving the planet or just doing more work. Watching TV or surfing the net every night for hours, indicates we have the time to do all of the above and more but we fritter away small increments of time just as easily as hitting that delete key over and over and over

The horror of eighteen months of deletion is bad enough but when you add the distraction of addictively checking emails so frequently that no single job gets done without interruption it exacerbates the time situation even more. Consider checking your emails and finding nothing but rubbish? Having interrupted your work flow and thought process you have added the distraction factor where nothing of consequence is accomplished and you still aren't back to doing your work.

I'm thinking another 6 months added and we are now talking years of nothing accomplished, due to rubbish in your inbox. Is it time to consider spending some of that deletion time on unsubscribing time or even hiring someone to hit the delete button? Talk about an investment in your future.