“Email is the thing that now causes us the most problems in our working lives”, says Karen Renaud of Glasgow University. With a team of academics including a computer scientist, psychologist and a statistician she surveyed 177 people and found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email. This means that people who check their email every five minutes waste a whole working day - or 8.5 hours a week - figuring out what they were doing moments before. As a result, more than one third of workers feel stressed by the sheer number of emails and the obligation to respond quickly.
Toby Ruckert, a serial entrepreneur who came up with the concept of TAROBY says: “Such findings confirm what we've been predicting for several years now. When we first came to New Zealand in 2002, we already had established business operations overseas, but New Zealand and its people fascinated us. My wife and I wanted to stay. The biggest difficulty for us was to retain an effective means of communication with our different businesses on the other side of the world without being personally present at all times. However there was simply no suitable software available so we had to completely reinvent the wheel.”
After years of development and beta-testing, this new application which could completely change the way we look at email today, will finally be unveiled on the upcoming Bizzone Business Expo in Auckland.
“Gone are the days when the stream of incoming messages could create havoc, because no one knew who is handling what. TAROBY is a new generation email client that makes your inbox a “Team Dashboard” and allows you to create, manage and share email messages among team members and access them anytime, from anywhere - helping organisations to improve their internal and external communication.”
Research indicates that Ruckert and Varghese are on to something: Latest findings of Basex, a leading information analyst firm suggests that today's “Information Overload” costs the U.S. economy alone a minimum of US$ 900 billion per year in lowered employee productivity and reduced innovation. A study conducted by the Henley Business Management School in the UK says that the average manager loses 3.5 years of his entire life attending to completely unnecessary emails.
TAROBY stands for “Team Automated Response Optimisation – BY YOU” and aims to change this stressful outlook by putting people back in control of their workspace. But come and see the future of email for yourself: Visit TAROBY @ stall 148c on the Auckland Business Expo in Greenlane from 27th - 29th May 2009.
