Want to Improve Your Productivity? Analyze Your Email Stats

(MoneyWatch)  If your organization uses e-mail as a general-purpose communication tool, then you're probably aware of how even small changes in e-mail practices can have a significant impact on how much time and energy employees spend sending messages back and forth. The only problem is that it's often really hard to know how everyone uses their e-mail, and thus draw any meaningful recommendations.

There are all sorts of questions you can ask to help drive process improvement: How many messages did you send last month? Last quarter? How much bandwidth did these messages consume? Likewise, who did you send mail to? Who did you receive mail from? How many messages did you exchange with specific recipients? If you'd like access to data for these kinds of questions, I've got a free Outlook add-on that can do all this for you in moments.

Topalt Reports is a free Outlook add-on that lets you create powerful reports based on your Outlook usage. The program lets you choose from among four reports:

• E-mail counts over a selected date range
• E-mail bandwidth over a selected date range
• The number of e-mails received from each sender over a date range
• The number of e-mails received from each recipient over a date range

Each report can be viewed in the Topalt program or exported to Excel, where you can analyze the data or even extract information for other applications. For example, would it be useful to have a list of all the people to whom you have emailed in the last 6 months? It's easy to get with Topalt. [via AddictiveTips]

More on BNET:

• 8 Tips for Catching Typos Before You Click Send
• How to Communicate More Effectively in E-mail
• Delegate Your Gmail Account to Your Assistant. Also, You Should Hire an Assistant