Why Email Has Become Dangerous 255
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."
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.
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.
Re:Oh! I can't wait until they do a study like thi (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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).
Re:Email is the best (Score:2, Insightful)
Same here, I need to focus and often do not check my email for an hour or two.
Any phone call complelty kills my focus.
Stupid studies like this that do not consider the impact of alternatives just make my bosses encourage others to call me instead of writing me a well structured Email.
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: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/
Re:Oh! I can't wait until they do a study like thi (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 inbox, not subfolders).
Re:Email is the best (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 come in, I can ignore it for the moment and address it when I'm finished with my current task.
But I think there's a touchy-feely backlash against email that favors the immediate human contact, regardless of the side-effects.
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.
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?
Re:Email is the best (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 distracted or not. At work, I often wear headphones so that I don't have to listen to other people talking, or the phone ringing.
Email has notifiers to let me know, voicemail has notifiers to let me know, IM has notifiers to let me know. I don't have to check. A quick perusal of my task/status bar tells me all I need to know.... when I want to know.
If people seriously don't want to be interrupted, it's possible.
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..."
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.
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.
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.
Dangerous? (Score:5, Insightful)
Visiting slashdot is now dangerous, too. Luckily, it is only sometimes lame.
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!
Re:Email is the best (Score:1, Insightful)
I couldnt agree more. Working in IT is always having to prove yourself afterwards if a client starts complaining you agreed on something.
Also there are legal requirements, think of SOXA for example, you need proof of certain statements.
Too much info going back and forth, you cant remember everything.
Working in a Change Management position at the moment and i need to track, at every given time, around 70 to 80 changes that we are handling and 100+ that are run by other groups. Verbal communication is impossible at that scale. Also gathering evidence of approvals etc need to be administrated.
Email is my working ground, it is my "business critical" application.
In private life i tend to check EMail every other day or so, i rather talk to friends.