British Report Details the Stress of Email Communication

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.'"

A day? For an email? While you're in the office?

[jandrese]

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.

wait a day? unheard of!

[wilsonjd]

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.

If you treat e-mail

[Bullfish]

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.

my old job

[gEvil (beta)]

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).

Re:If I don't do it then, I forget

[sg3000]

> 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 a bit (thus, freeing up time talking about it on Slashdot).

However, my boss's in-box is hilarious. He easily has thousands of unread messages, and he's always complaining that the IT department doesn't give us a large enough in-box capacity. He is also like one of those people that has dozens (hundreds?) of files on his Windows desktop, rather than filing them away. I think this is due to many people having an out of sight, out of mind issue. If they don't have their emails or files staring at them all the time, they'll forget they're there, and they won't know how to quickly find them again.

Re:wait a day? unheard of!

[ghoul]

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 help and they would work even better if people would use the low importance flag on articles and jokes they forward. Dont get me wrong I appreciate the forwards but the flag would let me know its something I can look at at the eod.

Re:Who checks their email?

[Pope]

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're doing late night work and the server support guys aren't logged into their email.