Workplace has banned emails and staff couldn't be happier Club CEO Matt O'Hara with employee Kelsey Schultz at Illawarra Yacht Club / Pic: AdamTaylor Source: DailyTelegraph DON'T bother sending Matt O'Hara an email if you want to get in touch - you'll be waiting a while for a reply. The CEO of two Illawarra clubs has taken the bold step of not only ditching his work email account but convincing employees to do the same and return to the halcyon days of face-to-face conversations and chats on the phone. And Mr O'Hara reckons that his working life is sweeter as a result. As boss of Oak Flats Bowling Club and the Illawarra Yacht Club, the 41-year-old yesterday said that he had been spending as much as 25 hours a week sorting through, reading and replying to emails. Now it's more like 45 minutes a fortnight and then only to scan his inbox for anything critical and delete the rest. "Like a lot of people who are office-bound or semi office-bound, I found that I had become very time-poor," Mr O'Hara said yesterday. So I kept a log of what I was doing and I was really shocked to see that I was spending three or four hours a day on email. You just think you're doing business ... but I found that two-thirds of my inbox came from three people and I shared an office block with all of them. Mr O'Hara said unplugging staff from their keyboards had improved productivity and - with no email to keep them busy - employees were more likely to spend more time on the floor with patrons. They were also more likely to leave on time at the end of the day. "It is life-changing," he said. From the outset, one of the things I wanted to achieve was to knock off at five o'clock, go home and see my wife and family and ultimately not get divorced like 50 per cent of the population does. In the afternoon I get two hours with the kids before they go to bed. If I am an hour late for that, that is eating up 50 per cent of our time together. This is me saying I need to be more efficient at work, I need to get my job done and then leave and spend that quality time with my family. At the end of the day, we don't sit on our death bed and say: 'I should have spent more time at the office', and that's really what sums it up for me. And while convincing other companies to eschew email and pick up the phone hadn't been easy in some cases, it meant they now spent five minutes on the phone rather than an hour sending emails back and forth to reach the same conclusion. US company MessageMind, which creates software to improve how workers use email, said an average of one-third of the time spent on work email was wasted sorting and reading unimportant messages. Director Alain Oberrotman said research showed that workers considered fewer than 30 per cent of their work emails as "critical." "Email's relentless growth has an ongoing negative impact on work-life balance," Mr Oberrotman said. Workers spend 30 per cent of their email time before and after working hours processing emails. Email continues to be the primary tool for business communication, with an estimated 89 billion work-related emails sent each day.