How one email wasted 14 years

There are irritating one to everyone emails – and then there are mind numbingly wasteful  one to 840,000 emails.

As you may have read, an email generated within the NHS was recently was sent to 840,000 people – by mistake.

If each person took just  10 seconds to delete that email – a “back of a fag packet” calculation says that would take 292 working days out of the NHS!

But this is not counting:
– all the reply to all’s (another 292 days – a conservative estimate)
– all the time wasted gossiping about the mishap (an additional 1000 days)
– the resultant  slowing down of the system due to volume (an additional 2000 days)

So that one email has taken an estimated 3,584 days out of the organisation – which equates to 14 years of time.

The equivalent of one worker off sick for 14 years.

The point here is not what happened at the NHS (someone, somewhere, must be awfully embarrassed!).

The point is that this is happening every day in almost every company. Granted it doesn’t show up quite as badly as this unfortunate major mishap.

However consider that a single email sent to 60 people can easily take 4 working days out of an organisation. Mulitply that by 10 and you’ve just lost 40 staff!

And we just put up with it. Why??

If a computer is not functioning we get someone to fix it. If a photocopier is not working an engineer comes out. If someone is not using their spreadsheet correctly we train them – but with email we just think that is how it is and realistically nothing can be done.

Day in and day out – month on month – year after year.

It does not have to be this way!

Now I invite you to read the comment below – it was made about the NHS email blunder by an NHS employee who has previously attended an Emailogic training session:

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Jason Conway