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British Report Details the Stress of Email Communication

Posted by Zonk on Tue Aug 14, 2007 10:04 AM
from the yeah-way-rougher-than-construction-work dept.
The Internet Communications Science
WaltonNews writes "British researchers have found that pressures from handling emails throughout the work day cause stress and frustration with workers. Researchers from a pair of collaborating universities have found that heavy email communication causes anxiety, with some workers thinking they checked their email as often as once every fifteen minutes. The reality was much worse. From the article: 'When researchers fitted monitors to their computers, workers were found to be viewing e-mails up to 40 times an hour. About 33 per cent said they felt stressed by the volume of e-mails and the need to reply quickly. A further 28 per cent said they felt "driven" when they checked messages because of the pressure to respond. Just 38 per cent of workers were relaxed enough to wait a day or longer before replying.'"
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Submission: British report describes e-mail stress by WaltonNews (1054232)
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  • Personally (Score:3, Funny)

    by 0racle (667029) on Tuesday August 14 2007, @10:06AM (#20225017)
    I just don't care that much about my job. What's with people stressing out so much about some e-mail?
  • I don't know about most of you, but if I don't respond to an email pretty much when I get it, then I'm much more likely to forget to reply to it. That's part of the reason I compulsively check email and respond to it immediately. I don't think it's stressful though.

    • I don't know about most of you, but if I don't respond to an email pretty much when I get it, then I'm much more likely to forget to reply to it.

      If you keep your inbox largely clear, then this shouldn't happen. Turn email messages into "To-do" items on your To-Do list, or turn them into items on your calendar. Replying immediately is a good idea if you are able to, of course. Using your inbox as a To-Do list is not, generally, a good idea, although some may find it is OK.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by sg3000 (87992) *
        > If you keep your inbox largely clear, then this shouldn't happen.

        It's funny to see how people manage their in-boxes. I do many of the suggestions you listed, and I have my email client only check my email once every 15 minutes (and even then, I have a set of carefully designed rules to filter out stuff I don't need to respond to in that time period). I don't have my Blackberry buzz me about new emails, so I only look at it when I've got time. I've found that this has helped me manage my work load quite
      • At my company, email is the primary communication mechanism. I easily get over 100 emails a day that should be responded to by someone, with about 50% of them being "group" mails to more than one person, or to an entire team, which I may or may not respond to directly depending on if I have anything to say.

        None of these are "to do" items, they are part of a conversation flow that has to take place between the team and the management in order to get things done. Some companies do this in group meetings, some do it in a top-down delegation approach. Mine does it with email. As such, I check my email around every 2-3 minutes at least, quickly scanning the inbox for messages that pertain to me.

        I don't feel it "stressful" though - it is part of the job.

        This is why I think stories like this are pointless. You can't take any group of people and generally classify them as checking email too often or too little unless you know the specifics of their job and company and how they use email in their day-to-day life. 150 emails in one day is nothign to me, but I know people in other jobs who would be freaked out if they had to deal with 5 per hour.

        • I check my email around every 2-3 minutes at least, quickly scanning the inbox for messages that pertain to me.

          How do you have time to get any actual work done, or is your job checking email?

          • It takes all of 1-2 seconds to scan through your inbox and see if any of the 10 new messages need a reply.
      • > Turn email messages into "To-do" items on your To-Do list, or turn them into items on your calendar.

        This item is actually on my TODO list. And that TODO list is also on a larger meta-TODO list. And that meta-list is stored in a binary format whose reader's code looks like // XXX: TODO - write comment about how I need to write a reader to read my meta-TODO list that includes multiple TODO lists one which has an item about replying to email should be put into a TODO list // PS need to learn you can use

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by plague3106 (71849)
      Why not just flag it for follow up or something similar so you don't forget about it?
  • Are you sure that 38% was "relaxed" enough, or were they just blowing off the writer?

    A bigger question is: Who polls their email client at work anymore? All of the modern clients have some sort of pop-up that will notify you when you have new mail, often with a tiny excerpt from the mail right in the window so you know if you need to read it or not. The only time I actually check the client is when I've been away from the desk for awhile and want to see what I've missed. There is no reason to keep opening up the client and manually pressing refresh.

    Also, in my experiance if someone who is in the office doesn't reply to your email within a few hours they probably never will.
    • Who polls their email client at work anymore?

      I was wondering the same thing. What is this "checking" they speak of? I don't even need to check Gmail. I can minimize the window and tell at a glance at the taskbar if there's a new message or not. and Outlook has the friendly pop up with summary. I can glance at the email and decide if I need to even read the whole thing or not.

      I think this article is long on hysteria and short on common sense. Consider this:

      About 33 per cent said they felt stressed by t

  • wait a day? unheard of! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wilsonjd (597750) on Tuesday August 14 2007, @10:09AM (#20225071)
    If I wait a day to respond to emails at work, I will get an email from my manager asking why I haven't responded to Most coworkers can't wait for email. They IM and expect immediate response.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ghoul (157158)
      Actually I have been trying to convince coworkers that if they need something immediately and it is a something I can answer off the top of my mind without interrupting what I am doing just IM. Reserve email for issues which will need me to stop what I am working on and spend some time writing an answer and in such cases expect a reply by eod or next day not immediately.
      I am still obsessive about checking email so now I have taken to completely shutting down outlook and starting it once every hour.
      Filters h

    • They IM and expect immediate response.
      Ring them up and tell them to stop bothering you.
  • Seriously, who "checks" their email these days? I just assumed everyone used gmail notifier, or outlook, or kontact, or thunderbird, or one of the zillion other programs that tell you when you have new email.

    • Re:Who checks their email? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MartinG (52587) on Tuesday August 14 2007, @10:18AM (#20225177) Homepage Journal
      I find those kinds of notifications just as distracting as the phone ringing. Yes, I can ignore either, but I'd rather finish what I'm doing and check my emails at a convenient point.

      Personally, I find email the best form of communication by far for work related issues. I can point people back to what I said earlier when they can't remember it, I don't get interrupted as readily, and I can refer back to what others have said and remind them of it later.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Pope (17780)
        If you have Outlook, turn off the toaster prompt and have the new email icon show up in the taskbar. Out of the way and doesn't distract.

        I avoid IM at work whenever possible for this very reason: I have enough to concentrate on without seeing stupid pop-ups every 2 minutes. I tried to do some testing and my project manager was IMing me every 2 minutes asking if I was done yet and how it was going. How the hell are you supposed to do a proper test with that kind of interruption? Now I'm only on MSN when we'r

  • Not new (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Zurd3 (574979)
    Some people have anxiety when taking a flight, going out of their houses, being in confined spaces, etc. And some people have anxiety with e-mail, nothing new here, move along.
  • to everyone in my .mailrc. Then I will read about whats the matter with the emails.

  • Stupid Newspaper Backlashes the Messenger (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Tuesday August 14 2007, @10:15AM (#20225147) Homepage Journal
    The study didn't even take into account whether the emails in question were urgent or not. Maybe the problem is that everyone is so overworked, not that the work is coming in email. If the messages weren't urgent, but people were as obsessed as that study concludes, then its conclusions would be valid. But if they are urgent, is that the fault of email? Has everyone been stressed out for a century by "the telephone", or by the transformation of our jobs into ones that are largely talking with each other about delegated and collaborated production work?

    Are they freaked out that people are "driven" to get into cars and trains every day, sometimes for hours, as part of our work?

    Really, what is the baseline against which this "abnormal email stress" is being measured? I suspect that it's the usual imaginary baseline in "the good old days" that tabloid newspapers have been inventing since... the good old days.
  • Email is the "situational awareness" of the workplace. I don't understand how having better visibility, through better communications, is "more stressful". To me, it is empowering and makes me feel BETTER about being on top of things. To me, it is far more stressful "being in the dark" - I'd rather be "in the know". I guess for some people ignorance really is bliss.
    • > To me, it is empowering and makes me feel BETTER about being on top of things.

      That's a good point, but I think the concern can be that being cc'ed on too many things can be overwhelming.

      At my company (foreign owned by a country known for being hierarchical and process oriented), people are used to cc'ing their managers on even routine emails. In the U.S., this would be viewed as micromanagement and the opposite of delegating, but for them, it's a way for their managers to be confident that things are
  • When researchers fitted monitors to their computers, workers were found to be viewing e-mails up to 40 times an hour.

    Of course they start checking their email frantically once the mean old researchers give the workers their monitors back.

  • If you treat e-mail (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bullfish (858648) on Tuesday August 14 2007, @10:18AM (#20225187)
    like a phone call, yeah, it can drive you bats. The thing about e-mail is that you can read it and leave it until/if you want to compose an answer. A problem some people have is they feel they have to answer each e-mail as if the person was right in front of them. If something begs an answer I usually give it to them. If it is important, I phone. In a lot of offices, e-mail has replaced memos which rarely required an answer, immediate or otherwise.

    Myself, if the e-mail has no subject, I delete it, it is is just a statement without a question, I delete it. After that, judge accordingly. People make their own stress. It's almost like a drug.
    • OK. Please confirm receipt of my reply.
    • You don't have to treat the phone as an immediate response either. We've had a Pavlovian response burned into our collective behavior over the past 50 years that we must pick up the phone when it rings. But you don't. Unless it's a special on-call phone/number or you're expecting a call which demands immediate attention, there's nothing wrong (IMHO) with letting it roll to voicemail after screening the number.

      I treat my phone as being there for my convenience, not someone else's.
  • Maybe they've got it backwards. Personally, I spend a lot of my day hitting the "check new mail" button - if somebody mails me, I can respond to that, rather than doing actual work.

    Peter
  • how people feel so much pressure to be in touch all the time. No, I am not a CEO nor do I run a NOC, where I can see how near instant communication can be critical. I suspect that most people have some psychological need to be always available.

    I will check my email if I am expecting something important. Everyone I deal with knows how to get in touch with me if something unexpected comes up. I once had an office mate that would email me a simple yes/no question if I was in the restroom at the time rather
  • ...check my email. Be right back.

  • my old job (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Tuesday August 14 2007, @10:22AM (#20225225)
    At my old job I was always getting a steady stream of emails. The way I handled it was by setting up filters in Outlook to separate things into folders/subfolders (thankfully many of my emails were machine-generated due to various event triggers, which made this whole system possible). I also set Outlook not to auto-mark messages as read--I had to do it myself. I would then use this arrangement of folders to prioritize my workload. When I responded to a message or completed the task it outlined, I would mark it read. It made for a very convenient way to measure my workload in different categories (4 messages in folder X, 11 in folder Y, 2 in folder Z--Let's knock out folder Y first). This also ensured that I responded to every single email, instead of seeing more than a few slip through the cracks because I forgot about them (which seemed to happen to just about everyone else in the office at some point or another).
    • Absolutely right. I do something similar - why on Earth would I want my inbox clogged up with email from the various monitoring systems and backup systems I run?

      Yet IME, 95% of people never even look at this filtering capability.
  • That's nothing, the last place I worked as the only computer tech they had, they insisted I set everyone's outlook to automatically check for messages every 1 minute. They were quite appalled when I told them that was the smallest increment Outlook would let them, they originally wanted it ever 15 seconds. What's sad is most of them will sit and hammer the send/receive button furiously.
  • You mean they didn't already have them?

  • Brits worry too much (Score:3, Funny)

    by peter303 (12292) on Tuesday August 14 2007, @10:26AM (#20225287)
    Most of the "sky is falling" articles come from the UK especially global warming. I immediately discount any news article from UK.
    • Not at all, we're not a nation of worriers, we're a nation of complainers - they just often manifest in the same way.

  • Email is a symptom, not a cause (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MobyDisk (75490) on Tuesday August 14 2007, @10:37AM (#20225435) Homepage
    I generally keep my inbox clear. The only things in my inbox are things I need to get back to. Email is nice, because I can get back to them as-needed.

    However, at my current job, my inbox is a 10 page mess. This isn't because I don't manage email properly - it's a symptom of the organization. Email doesn't cause stress any more than phone calls or postal mail. It becomes stressful if the job is stressful.

  • Bah! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Aqua_boy17 (962670) on Tuesday August 14 2007, @10:39AM (#20225455)
    You think e-mail gives you stress?

    I've got 4 mod points left and everytime I log onto /. it keeps saying 'Use 'em or lose 'em'. Now that's what I call stress.

    • I've got 4 mod points left and everytime I log onto /. it keeps saying 'Use 'em or lose 'em'.

      And worse yet, by replying to this article you've blocked a chance at using them!

  • Just 38% were "relaxed enough" to wait a day or more to answer the phone, too. Hope you like hold music.

    Seriously, is this all that bad? I check my mail whenever I have an idle cycle or three, and that often means that I get things done sooner rather than later. Similarly, probably the biggest single waste of time in my day is waiting on responses to things that I really wanted a response on soon.
  • I think a lot of people like to over-inflate the importance of their work. Pissant office workers from low level managers to data entry workers to mail room clerks enjoy furrowing their brow a lot and pretending that the economies of several western nations may come crashing down if they don't do their job. These are people whose sense of self worth comes from their job, they fail to realize that for people in their position, working is simply a means to an end.

    These are the people that stress about email a
  • I also find email can be a stress reliever. I get a lot of emails that deal with routine issues. If I have some complicated decision or other source of stress, it can be useful to just devote half an hour or so to dealing with routine stuff, which is varied enough to take my mind off of the day's crisis. Frequently, by the time I'm done, the answer I am seeking pops into my head.

  • Not just email (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Stiletto (12066) on Tuesday August 14 2007, @11:04AM (#20225781) Homepage
    Seems like one of the popular business fads of the moment is "having a sense of urgency". Have you heard this one? Your boss or executive manager probably has this buzz-phrase in his vocabulary. Everything is "urgent" now: From project completion to making your numbers, to handling unexpected events, to your everyday communication. URGENT! URGENT!! Every E-mail MUST be responded to, instantly! URGENT! Your competitors check their E-mail 20 times an hour, so it's urgent that you check 40 times an hour!! Every communication is of top importance, every bug is priority one, every E-mail is URGENT!

    I've seen offices where you'd get an E-mail, and if you didn't respond within a few minutes, you'd get an I.M. and if you didn't respond to that within a few seconds, it's a telephone call, and if you don't answer, someone will breathlessly rush to your desk to ask you face-to-face what flavor of coffee should get brewed next in the break room.

    No wonder people are getting stressed out. I think it's URGENT that we all take a break and realize that your business is not going to go up in flames if you relax and have normal paced communications.
  • These are some strange findings...
    I prefer email precisely because i can respond at my leisure, as opposed to a phonecall where you really are on the spot and forced to reply immediately. I will often take my time responding to email, thinking of what to write and the best way to get my point across. On the phone you dont have such time to think, thats why a lot of aggressive people (headhunters, salesmen) prefer to call you.
    Also, why bother checking email repeatedly, does your mail client not notify you in

  • This article is a lot about people like me.

    I'm in a mildly technical role, no development or anything like that - essentially I'm a product manager. On a day between 9am and 6pm I will receive, on average, one email just under every 3 minutes (about 180+ a day). Of these, about 50% of them are directed at me which require a response. 10% are from members of my team which are outward communication that I need to know about because, as the product manager, if someone asks you a question, they expect you to

  • When researchers fitted monitors to their computers, workers were found to be viewing e-mails up to 40 times an hour.

    Workers using computers without monitors checked their e-mail far less often.
  • I'm sure the Mandarins of low impact multicultural fat free no smoking bike helmets for everyone in the UK will soon pass a law limiting the number of emails one is allowed to see in a day with harsh penalties if they exceed that.

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