Why Email Has Become Dangerous

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."

gmail

[tlacuache]

Gmail's helped me out with this. Any mail I'm expecting but is not critically important (developers' mailing list digests, stuff from my family, etc.) gets auto-tagged and removed from my index. So once or twice a day I look and see what new mail is in those areas. Spam gets moved to the spam bin. At that point everything else, which isn't too much, is probably something that needs to be dealt with when it brings itself to my attention. But at least I'm not getting interrupted with a "new mail" notification as often as I actually get new mail.

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[account_deleted]

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64 seconds?

[ThePhilips]

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.

Re:Oh! I can't wait until they do a study like thi

[Geoffrey.landis]

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:Email is the best

[digitig]

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).

True story

[jeroen94704]

A previous co-worker of mine was always complaining about how all the email he got from the project lead was so distracting, and keeping him from getting work done. This surprised me, as I wasn't having this issue, even though we were on the same team, and getting essentially the same email. At some point though, we were was sitting behind his computer together when an email came in. That's when it became clear he had enabled every notification possible in Outlook: For every incoming email, a sound played, an icon started flashing in the system tray and a system-modal dialog popped up. When I pointed out that he might get a quieter day by disabling all notifications and simply checking his email manually a few times a day (As I do myself), he became very defensive and wouldn't hear about it. His argument was that some emails required his immediate attention, so he should know about their arrival instantly.

People

[smoker2]

This says more about those people than it does about email. If they can't keep focussed on a subject without their mind wandering off because of incoming mail, then they need other remedies. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you must. Honestly people complain about all the demands on their time, and then deliberately put themselves in situations that increase those demands. Sounds to me like they are engineering an excuse to do less work.

Re:I always get my reward

[cayenne8]

I don't think email is any more distracting that talking ...in fact, I find it less so. I do at times carry on almost real time conversations on email, it is quiet (no one else in cube land can hear what you're saying). But, if someone comes to talk to me....the conversation at times goes on longer than needed, and not everyone takes the hint that you are finished and leave...

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...

Oh brother

[jav1231]

This is bean-counter doomsdayer mentality. These are the same bozo's that try to quantify how much time you spend tuning your radio to a station or watching TV and the like. You can't get that time back. People simply aren't going to sit at a desk and use every second of their work day doing robotic activity, get over it. Humankind has already decided that the benefits of email are viable regardless. People like this either need a life or a place to go that's really quiet so they can count grains of sand in a jar.

Re:Desktop Alert

[UCSCTek]

I was going to post on how high I thought the 64 seconds of distraction estimate was, yet you seem to find it reasonable. I'm usually programming or analyzing data when I check e-mail (which tends to be every several minutes) and it certainly takes nowhere near a full minute to get back into my last task--for example, I just switched back to setting up some jobs to run right now and I'd guess it took maybe 5-10 seconds before I was full speed again. Switching from that back to writing this post was essentially fluid. So, I guess some people are just naturally better at multitasking, which points to a potential flaw in the article: if people are checking their e-mail with frequency related to their multitasking ability, then there is no issue with inefficiency.

Only true for the common mind

[HikingStick]

For those of us with ADD, that 8.5 hour figure isn't accurate. For the ADD mind, email can mean one of two things. It's either:

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.

Re:Are you guys serious?

[barzok]

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.