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An inordinate number of hours are lost checking email every year.

In case this wasn’t self evident enough for you, studies are being done to support this conclusion.  AOL & Opinion Research Corporation conducted a survey of 4,025 Americans age 13 and over showing that the average email user checks their email 5 times per day.  This would be a pretty low average for the people I know.  AOL has a higher percentage of home & child users than say Outlook 2007 users.  When asked a question which probably skews more toward the work audience - the results were more in line with what I see every day.  Sixty percent of people who own a portable email device check every new email arrival! 

Here is a BBC article on Karen Renaud’s work on email stress confirming this thesis.  Some workers were checking their email 40 times per hour with more checking correlated to higher stress levels.  Their prescription was simple enough to say, “Check email less often.”  However, I’ve asked friends of mine if they could do it in real life.  Could you only check email a few times per day?  Half of the people I spoke with said they thought it was a good idea - but most said they probably couldn’t manage to pull it off.  The other half said they thought that unplugging themselves from the email fire hose would be more stressful, not less!

Productivity lost

Investigating whether or not one is missing out on productivity is an interesting idea.   There are basically three sources of lost productivity here:

1. Confusing urgent with important - You probably have fewer “high priority” emails than you think you do.  Most likely there is more important “real work” to be done that is actually a better use of your time.
2. Multitasking is a net loss for people - Computers can make great use of multitasking or “context switching” because 99% of computer tasks involve using many different resources (monitor, memory, CPU, disk, network card, etc.).  These different resources can operate independently at nearly 100% efficiency.  People, on the other hand, take about 15 minutes to recover from every “distraction” or context switch.  This means that if you are distracted by email, the phone, or anything else every 45 min (and the email takes you almost no time to answer) you’re operating at only 80%-85% efficiency!
3. Increased stress - The tax that stress imposes on your life of constantly having to be around to answer questions, discuss intelligently, or even just absorb information is well documented.  Learning, concentration, and decision making are all impared when under prolonged stress.  Additionally, acute & even long-term stress has been shown to lower your quality of life and health.

I think there’s something to this stress & productivity argument - so I’m going to try it.

I’ve chosen 4 times, roughly evenly spaced, throughout the day to check my email.  During those periods of say 30 minutes each - I expect to be replying & checking email continuously.  I’m processing email - so that seems fine to me to be handling new emails then.  However, when I exit that email time, I’m offline for email.  I have turned off the automatic send/receive option, I have turned off the email arrival notifications, and I have even shut down Outlook entirely for hours of the day.  I’ll report back in a month or so how it went - I’m giving myself time to go through email withdrawal - hopefully with good news!

Another interesting note, this is AOL’s third annual “email addiction survey.”  Definitely a bad sign!

Addictive?

This idea of checking every new email makes me think that perhaps this isn’t just a waste of time for some people - it can be an addiction.  Addictions have many things in common - behavioral & neurobiological.  I haven’t been able to find any - but I would love to see fMRI pictures of a CEO, middle manager, or consultant checking email.  I am pretty confident it would look very similar to the signature “sex, drugs, rock & roll” brain scan pictures that we’ve all seen before.  Lots of “bright red” where the pleasure centers of the brain are.  Who knows, it might soon replace chocolate - the AOL survey noted that women are 23% more likely to describe themselves as addicted to email (16% vs. 13%) - and check it 15 min more per day than men.

What can you do if you are addicted?  Try using similar strategies that you use when you face other addictive situations:

I can already tell this is going to be a tough battle…

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