TAROBY: Official News & Blog

1. At the beginning of each week, try to have an inbox without a „scroll bar“. It helps a lot to plan your week and have a real overview over all matters related to email.
2. Do email in the afternoon, not in the morning. Except for the dispatching of works and urgent things that need attention because team members are waiting for, that do in the morning. Otherwise think of mornings as your most productive hours, so don’t use them for email alone!
3. If you use folders, it pays to check which folders you really need and which not. A folder with three messages in it is probably not worth the administration! A yearly analysis is fine and saves time for searching and filing throughout the year.
4. Put out of sight what you don’t need to see within the next 4 weeks – or even months. It just hinders you to work effectively. But make sure you create a followup if you want to be remembered or find it eventually.
5. Use email as email, don’t treat it like a phone! If you want an immediate reply or need a real conversation, call – or use an instant messaging facility. Otherwise you end up with a number of „micro-emails“ that all just need your attention eventually in terms of moving or putting them out of sight.
6. Don’t let email “get to you”. If you have followed idea number 1, you most likely can let your inbox grow over the week and do only those things which are really important. Use labels, tags or flags to mark them appropriately and be disciplined in answering those only. Leave the rest for the end of the week cleanup!
7. Change company related mail from individual mail into a team environment. Stop using personal email addresses such as alex@stressinternational.com (with exceptions) and replace them with generic email accounts (info@, sales@, support@ and so on) and share those with the members of the team.
8. Newsletters, RSS Feeds, Twitter Followers and so on which you don’t read anyway, unsubscribe!
9. Don’t permit yourself emails in your inbox which have „passed“ the expiry date of 12 months. Chances are that if a mail is older than one year, you have just avoided making the necessary decisions what to do about the matter. So simply „decide“.
10. Finally guide your staff on how to use email effectively, if they can’t cope with it, you also suffer. But be practical: would you listen to anybody who has not mastered the subject himself?

Copyright by Toby Ruckert, certified Taroby Consultant.

Startup Company from Waiheke Island launches new Product designed to improve the Workflow within SMBs by reducing Information Overload.

Auckland 12th May 2009: Email is one of the most efficient ways of communication in our time. At least you’d think so. But in recent years, increased email traffic has resulted in jammed inboxes, unfinished work and frustrated workers.

“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.” says Aby Varghese, CTO and Co-Founder of TAROBY International Limited.

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.

ENDS

About TAROBY International Limited

TAROBY International Limited is an IT startup company on Waiheke Island. It was founded by Toby Ruckert and Aby Varghese who already own a software development company “AMT” (Advanced Millennium Technologies) in Bangalore, India. Toby and Aby started working together purely via the internet in 2002 and quickly realized the need for better communication software in the future which eventually lead to the development and foundation of TAROBY in New Zealand.

The mission statement for Taroby is “to universally connect people and cultures; to make private and business lives easier, by developing creative software solutions that focus on innovation, design, usability and efficiency, thus enabling the individual user to spend time more meaningful every moment”.

For photos or further information, please contact us.

The following numbers are based on the results from various reknown research institutes and analysts and quite interesting to read.

• 80: The percentage of emails sent which are actually ’spam’ – unsolicited adverts, many of which are fraudulent or otherwise illegal.
• 62: The percentage of workers who check business emails while at home or on holiday.
• 10: The points fall in IQ experienced by workers distracted by email (more than twice that found in cannabis studies).
• 3.5: The years a manager spends of his entire life attending to completely unecessary email.
• 33: The annual energy consumption produced by spam (in billion kilowatt hours).
• 0.3: The average CO2 emission for a spam email (in grams).
• 868: The Internet’s globally estimated carbon footprint (in billion kilowatt hours).

As of April 2009.

Taroby cordially invites you to the Bizzone Auckland Business Expo

Every year, the expo brings together an extensive range of products, services and seminars customized for small to medium business owners and managers. This is the perfect opportunity to discover how to improve business efficiency, lower costs, seek information on growing your business and do some essential networking. Last year’s expo was amazing and this year will without a doubt be just as good, if not better. If you get a chance come visit the Taroby team at our stall 148 C for a chat. The expo will be at the ASB showground’s in Auckland Greenlane on:

Wednesday   27 May 9am-4pm
Thursday       28 May 9am-8pm
Friday           29 May 9am-4pm

You can get your free Expo ticket courtesy of TAROBY by registering at the link below:

www.bizzone.com/guestof/taroby

You will then have access to all of the seminars and the exhibit hall absolutely FREE !

Don’t miss this leading B2B event of the year: everybody who attends the Bizzone Business Expos goes in the draw to win the Smart Marketing Prize worth $100,000

Hope to see you there!