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Why Email Has Become Dangerous
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Sep 10, 2008 08:33 AM
from the run-away-run-away dept.
from the run-away-run-away dept.
mikkl666 writes "The Sydney Morning Herald runs an interesting story dealing with a study about email user behavior, explaining how and why email can be a terrible distraction: 'It takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email. So people who check their email every five minutes waste 8 1/2 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.' Email is also compared to slot machines in the way it works psychologically: 'So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful — an invite out or maybe some juicy gossip — and I get a reward.' There are also some hints offered on how to keep control of the inbox, for those of us already addicted."
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Oh! I can't wait until they do a study like this.. (Score:5, Funny)
Now, WTF was I doing....
Re:Oh! I can't wait until they do a study like thi (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Oh! I can't wait until they do a study like thi (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Oh! I can't wait until they do a study like thi (Score:5, Insightful)
The best/worst part of TFA (and I couldn't really keep myself reading after this pile of crap) is this:
Mr Reynolds has even begun to think of email as rude and invasive, preferring to use tools such as Twitter and Flickr. He also uses social networking sites such as Dopplr, which tracks people's travel, to find out if they are away before he contacts them, and status alerts from instant messenger or Twitter to help him decide if now is a good time to interrupt them. Other tools, such as blogs and wikis, have decreased the amount of email that he sends and receives, while RSS feeds and recommendations from friends and colleagues allow him to keep abreast of the most important news.
How the heck is checking multiple social networking sites, blogs and RSS feeds going to be any less distracting or addictive than having one place to check all your messages? Using multiple sites in such a manner means that every single message you send then becomes a mini adventure in itself, which is a surefire way to lose your train of thought. And since when was sending someone an email 'interrupting' them? Email will only interrupt you if you have a client open and set to alert you, or have been stupid enough to leave email enabled on your phone while doing whatever it is that requires you not to be interrupted.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Reading the bit you quoted, I'd say that Mr Reynolds has only recently discovered that Outlook isn't a Web browser. The next step is the realization that you don't have to open the message as soon as it arrives.
I especially liked:
which tracks people's travel, to find out if they are away before he contacts them, and status alerts from instant messenger or Twitter to help him decide if now is a good time to interrupt them
My IM client is almost always set to busy. However, if you need to contact me, please send me an e-mail and I will respond as soon as I am able.
Re:Oh! I can't wait until they do a study like thi (Score:5, Funny)
My sentiments regarding slashdot!
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Email is also compared to slot machines in the way it works psychologically: "So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful."
Obligatory xkcd reference [xkcd.com]
(don't forget to mouse over)
Re:I always get my reward (Score:5, Interesting)
Nice thing with email, it is asynchronous, you can leave a conversation hanging if you have to do something else which is more difficult to do conversing in person or on the phone.
While I know that supposedly only old people in korea use email, I find it one of my best tools for conversing with people, often multiple ones at the same time. And since nowhere I've ever worked allowed IMs due to security reasons, I've never really used them. But, pretty much everywhere has email...
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Getting a marketing call is the worst. How the fark did they get my direct dial number? It's not just bad because it's directly distracting, it's bad because afterwards I get pissed off that I was distracted.
At least if I choose to check my email (or IM) messages it's because I want to [know if I have any replies on /.]. Also if I'm busy I can just not check my email. Since I use Outlook for my work mail I can just check the system try to see if there's a mail icon anyway (but this only works for the main i
Hey (Score:5, Funny)
I check my e-mail more often than every five minutes and I
What? What was I doing?
Re:Hey (Score:5, Funny)
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Email is the best (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as not interrupting work, email is better than any other medium because I can choose when to read the message. That is not true if someone calls me, or walks into my cube.
Re:Email is the best (Score:5, Funny)
People call me telling they are going to send a mail.
I used to check my mail two or 3 times a day, but where I work now it is a 'must' to respond immediately on every mail. Only half the work is done.
I guess the only people actually working is IT to keep the mail server up and running.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Quite. I usually check my email at the start of work, before and after lunch and at the end of the day. I used to get phone calls asking why I didn't respond to an email 10 minutes earlier, although I seem to have managed to train my co-workers that email is not an immediate means of communication (and that the "high priority" flag is their priority, not mine).
Re:Email is the best (Score:5, Insightful)
I am one of those people that insist on communicating via email. Here are my reasons:
1) Workflow and queueing: everything I work on MUST be listed and prioritized in our request database. It is part of my job description. I have been instructed by my direct supervisor to only work on projects that have an official request in the database, period. Any updates to the work being done are also entered into the database as running comments. If a person sends me an email about a project I can enter that information into the database just as it was sent and not have to try to remember every detail of a telephone conversation. This method makes it easier for me to make sure that what the user wants is what they will actually get.
2) Time Savings: I have found that if a user is forced to type out their requests via email or directly into a database of some sort that they will be far more succinct than if they are involved in a conversation. I don't ever remember receiving an email request where the first 4 paragraphs are "how's it going?" or "this is what has been going on in my life recently" or "did you hear about the new person in Accounting? I heard they came here from blah blah blah."
3) Historical record: again, trying to remember details of telephone conversations over the span of a project, even if decent notes are taken, will almost certainly lead to something getting missed. I have had the experience several times in my career of having a user insist that they told me a certain tidbit of information when in fact they had not. I have also had the experience where the user actually DID tell me something and I just plain forgot. Having a reference record in the form of saved emails makes this much less likely to occur. There is also the "Cover Your Backside" benefit. Like it or not, at some time in your career you WILL have to defend something you did or did not do, and having the email trail to back you up helps tremendously.
So, you can call me a grumpy old codger, or whatever the current vernacular requires, but I will continue to insist that business communications occur via email. Now you kids get off my lawn!
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Re:Email is the best (Score:4, Funny)
People call me telling they are going to send a mail.
People call me asking me if I got a memo, then I politely say I got it already, that I just forgot to put the cover sheet on it. But they insist on sending me the memo again just in case.
Then my other boss walks in my cubicle, and asks if I got the memo, as I politely respond I just forgot to put the cover sheet on. But he insists that he's "gonna have to go ahead and send me the memo again".
I can't wait for the meeting with "The Bobs" to explain how I only get about an hour of actual work done a day.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
At our company there's always talk about how "email is so impersonal and such an inefficient communication method" and "wouldn't it be much better to just pick up the phone or walk over to someone's desk", and every time it comes up I try to raise this very point.
How am I supposed to concentrate on what I'm doing if someone actually walks up to me and asks me something, or buzzes me on my phone? These things are interruptions that REQUIRE an immediate response. It's not like an email, where if I see one com
I get dinged on that at every "review". (Score:5, Informative)
Fortunately, I don't care about reviews any more.
I use email because:
#1. It is self-documenting. If you ask me the same question next week, I'll forward you the email I sent you last week.
#2. It is self-documenting. If you want to claim that you didn't agree with something next week, I'll forward you the email where you did agree with it last week.
#3. It requires a LOT more thought than talking. That means that people have to THINK about what they want to say rather than calling me and uh, well, I was, uh, that thing, it, uh, was, uh ....... Why waste MY time for YOU to get YOUR thoughts in order?
#4. It allows me to send you lists like this. I can identify each point and if you have points to add, you can add them. You can reply to my points, by number.
#5. All of the above WHEN IT IS CONVENIENT FOR ME. (and when you consider it convenient for you). You have a RECORD that YOU involved me. Now the ball is in my court. I will get to it as soon as I deal with the issues that are more important. And I expect the same from you.
FUCK "immediate human contact". The people I've encountered are (generally) not pre-disposed to clear communication. They are easily distracted and LOVE personal anecdotes and trivia. That's fine when I'm at lunch or grabbing coffee or whatever. NOT when I'm trying to fix a problem before it impacts the entire company.
When I'm working, I am WORKING. I expect the same from you.
Put it in email. That way we'll have documentation for who was involved in the decision, what the decision was, why we decided that way, what criteria we considered and what options we discarded.
If we have a "face to face" meeting, then SOMEONE is going to have to take notes about that and THEN write up those notes and get everyone's sign-off on them so they can be used as documentation.
My current CIO hates the way I use email. I believe it is because he hates having a papertrail of his decisions.
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Twitter? ROFL (Score:5, Insightful)
Mr Reynolds has even begun to think of email as rude and invasive, preferring to use tools such as Twitter
Yeah, right! And did you know that heroin was invented because doctors in the 19th century thought morphine was too addictive?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You should try this just to watch what happens. When one of those people that wants your time visits your cube, and while they are talking the phone rings, ignore it while they look at you like they are waiting for you to answer it. I treat the phone like email in that regard. If it's important, they'll leave a message and I'll get to them when MY schedule permits. Depending on caller ID, I might answer, might not. It's not the medium that is distracting, it is whether a person will let themselves be distra
You were already wasting time.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Dot dot dot. (Score:4, Insightful)
Lets just throw in that distracting "talking" thing which many people are utterly addicted to. They waste hours every day talking or being talked at. Many love to exchange lots of gossip and when they hear something juicy or tell a joke and their reward center is triggered by another talker reacting positively they get a buzz like with a slot machine and it can be terrible for your concentration.
Like Slashdot itself (Score:4, Insightful)
usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful
This describes Slashdot exactly.
I would have been first (Score:2)
On a more serious note, does anyone else feel this article is a bit on the flimsy side. To me, it reads like a bad self-help book in search of a gullible audience.
gmail (Score:2, Interesting)
Slashdot (Score:2)
Auto-notification? (Score:2)
I check my email maybe a few times a day. When I get a message Thunderbird shows a nice little box telling me who it's from and a bit of the subject. If I miss that there's an icon in the system tray. Why on earth should I bother to keep opening my email client window?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe I should add that the summary shown when mail arrives it also good for evaluating if I should open the email client window or just do it later and avoid a context switch...
Sorry, not waste (Score:5, Insightful)
This argument is essentially flawed: It does not take into account the time *saved* by checking the email every five minutes.
If I get an email from my boss he might need an immediate answer, otherwise it is *his* time (more expensive) that is wasted if he needs an answer before he can do something.
And this also applies for my colleagues.
Plus since I don't have to idle while they answer, I make up for that 'wasted' time the article mentions.
Please don't listen to this crap, if you don't want to waste time on email just ignore those powerpoints with music and flowers, but do read the work emails as soon as possible.
Re:Sorry, not waste (Score:4, Insightful)
No, this is a case of folks needing to use the right medium for the right purpose. EMail is intended to be asynchronous. If your boss needs an immediate answer, he should walk over and talk to you, or pick up the phone. Sometimes, something is too complicated or will take a lot of back and forth, but is not urgent. I will schedule a brief meeting so as to presume the recipient needs to drop everything to attend to what I need. If something is urgent, I get my butt out of my chair and walk over to the person who has the info.
Iit ain't really complicated/
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Re:Sorry, not waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Work email should have decent round-trip times.
Yes, because a phone call is less of an interruption than a quick email. In fact a phone call is likely to interrupt if not annoy other people as well, and anyway if my boss calls me I'm going to say 'I'll check it and get back to you' anyway (my boss doesn't call to ask the time).
There's a difference between 'urgent' and 'as soon as you can'. I don't expect people to get out from a meeting to answer an email, and I think everyone's entitled to take a piss without being called on their cell. However, if they are on their desk and not doing something really urgent, I appreciate that they don't have long email checking cycles.
By the way, I never email non work stuff to work addresses. I do have friends at work of course but if I send them something that is not related to work I use their personal addresses.
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Push Email! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why push email is so good. You don't (or don't need to) be hovering around your inbox like a dog wanting to get a treat. On my Blackberry, I setup filters and blocks so only the important emails come through, while the regular 'crap' stays on my inbox. It's still distracting (unless you turn on silent), but it still distracts a LOT less than checking your email every few minutes...
Minor - very minor. (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, so what about all the other interruptions in the day (mandatory meetings that don't involve what you're doing but you have to go to it anyway, emergencies that pop up which you're required to jump after, the Boss stopping by to get your input on something he/she just saw somewhere, folks stopping by to tell you some joke they heard on TV last night, vendors(!) wanting to get a word in edge-wise with you, phone calls, etc)?
Trust me, there's far worse than email out there (and I can always minimize my email client until I decide to go look at it).
64 seconds? (Score:3, Interesting)
In corporations, you have to react to e-mail fast. That's why people check it often.
I'd say working in large companies is more dangerous (and distracting) than e-mail itself.
Working for smaller companies, I never had problems writing 1000+ lines of code per day. Working in large companies, I have to stay after 6pm to be able to concentrate at all. And e-mail, believe me, is least of the distractions.
Are you guys serious? (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA and some comments keep mentioning "checking email every 5 minutes".
Don't you use email clients that check for new email automatically every 5 minutes and tells you if a new email has arrived? If you need to manually click a "get new emails" button every 5 minutes then I suggest you find a better program.
In fact I've never seen an email client that couldn't do this, so what gives?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"Turn off intrusive alerts. Anything that pops up, flashes, or goes "ding!" will interrupt you when you're trying to focus and will trigger a response to check your email."
That seems like a really bad idea to me. Without alerts, I would be checking for new emails a lot more often than I already do.
Re:Are you guys serious? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I spend less time checking for mail if I have alerts turned off. The alerts are a distraction more than anything else, every time I get one it triggers me to go look at my inbox.
The key is SMART alerts. Only have it pop up an alert if something that needs immediate attention pops up. I've done this in the past, and it lets me work for hours on end without being distracted by non-priority emails.
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The bain of instant messaging (Score:5, Insightful)
I work in a corporate culture where if you are not available via
instant messaging, many perceive is that you are not really working at
the time. I know several people who wake up in the morning and the
first thing they do is connect via the VPN to get their instant
messaging client running so that their bosses and coworkers think
they are working diligently. I work best by batching tasks via email
messages, so I make it clear to people to just send me an email and I
will get back to them within a day or so. This does not work for some
people; one person in my organization will try instant messaging me
and calling my office phone, but he will not bother to send me an
email, and then he will later complain that he cannot communicate with
me.
As a software engineer, I remain productive by having several hours of
uninterrupted time to focus on a particular task at hand. When the
code builds, installs, tests, and is in the repo ready for the next
release, then I am ready to move on to the next task, like check my
email, which I do maybe two or three times a day. I am able to give my
code the due attention it deserves, and I can concentrate on not
making coding mistakes by keeping the entire code context "swapped in"
my head while I am working on it. During that time, invariably some
project manager somewhere is panicking about a status report or some
other overhead and is trying to get me to update a bug ticket or
something. Usually, by the time I read his frantic email about the
status report, I have already fixed the problem that he wants status
on because I was able to focus on it without interruption.
Most people eventually figure out that they get good consistent work
from me regardless of the fact that they cannot interrupt me freely at
any time, like most other employees in my organization. I do wish that
more of my coworkers would take a more proactive stance on not letting
themselves get interrupted all the time, since I see first-hand the
negative impact it has on their ability to function. I get annoyed
when I am trying to talk to my boss during a meeting and he stammers
right in the middle of an important discussion with, "Uh, wait, I just
got am IM, I, uh, need to, uh, just a second, let me think..."
Re: (Score:3)
There are definitely things worse than email distraction.
Very context-dependent (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the study's results are extremely age-, habit-, and context-dependent.
1) I'm a freight forwarder, dealing with time-sensitive issues all the time, and receiving around 150 emails a day (not counting junk/spam/personal). If it took me a minute or more to return to the context of what I was doing every time I answer an email, I'd never leave work. Perhaps for people in fields where email isn't a constant thing, it would be more distracting, but certainly not for people where email IS their job.
2) I'm 41. I've been 'on the internet' since at least the mid 90's (cred: I had a 5-digit slashdot ID at one time but forgot the login/pw....) so for me email is a very usual way to communicate, I prefer it. Even I have to admit that I'm baffled by how well younger people (teens or 20-somethings) can multitask through 8 different chat threads simultaneous. Yes, like many my age, I try to tell myself that they aren't able to think 'as deeply' in that experience, but in honesty that's a rationalization and they may simply be much better at that 'style' of comunication. For someone like my parents, I'd say yes, an email may be very jarring but for my generation and younger, not so much.
So while I can accept that a lawyer or researcher in his or her mid fifties or 60's, on hearing the 'ding' of email and breaking out of what they were doing to read it may indeed take over a minute to get back into the groove of what they were doing, I don't believe this result is average for most computer-literate people today.
True story (Score:3, Interesting)
People (Score:4, Interesting)
Desktop Alert (Score:4, Insightful)
I have to say; I think the most absolute distracting thing is a phone ringing, beit mine or someone in the cube farm. When I recieve a call, my thought processes are rattled for several minutes and most of the time when I hang up I find I get up to get coffee, etc. Even hearing someone elses phone is is enough to break a train of thought.
I would give anything if there were some way to have a silent, maybe on screen or vibrating FOB or something, notification to pick up the phone; and the office made everyone use them.
At my last gig the helpdesk phone rang to our area incase the HD (2 people) were out or busy and it drove me absolutely nuts; and I am sure it cost me literally weeks worth of productivity.
Oh brother (Score:5, Interesting)
Dangerous? (Score:5, Insightful)
Visiting slashdot is now dangerous, too. Luckily, it is only sometimes lame.
Only true for the common mind (Score:4, Interesting)
1) business as usual (we're still getting things done and may even be more productive when our minds get these wonderful little rabbit trails), or
2) we get absolutely nothing important done (so that 8.5 hour figure would actually refer to weekly productive time.
Then again, for a minority of the ADD crowd (myself included), Slashdot takes the place of email in serving as that uber-stimulus that actually helps keep me running at peak efficiency.
Good to see news that's only 6 years old re-posted (Score:5, Informative)
The study that talks about the 64 second recovery time was published in *2002*. How is this news today??!
Oh, and it included an astounding 16 subjects that worked at one company.
Yeah, that's good data to base generalized conclusions on about all email usage and behavior.
Re:Don't check your email (Score:5, Interesting)
The ideal is not to do that, because you will stop doing what you were doing and start doing something else.
The best is to have fixed times during the day as to where you launch your email client and answer all the mails in there and then CLOSE your client again.
I used to do it two or three times a day. Morning, to get starting, right after luch and an hour before leaving to see if anything MUST be done immediately. Most of the time it could wait till the next morning. Sometimes it was 1 mail and exceptionally 2 mails that needed action or a reply.
And more often then not, not responding to an email would solve the problem by itself.
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Re:load of BS (Score:5, Funny)
Four years ago I didn't even know how to SPELL engeneer and now I ARE one!
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