Email Interruptus
Email interrupts us all the time. Just recovering from those interruptions and remembering what we were doing beforehand costs an entire workday every week, according to study cited in this interesting piece, Breaking the email compulsion. The article pulls together several salient studies and makes a nice argument for why we like email so much: it gives us constant rewards. In other words, Email is kind of like chocolate for the brain. We click the ‘check messages’ button and get a treat!
I know my brain works this way. I even like getting spam, in part because I can delete it quickly. The rest of my email sits there, in-box residue that builds up to guilt-inducing levels (will 5000 unfiled messages give the program a coronary? 10,000?).
The consultant who wrote this article, Suw Charman-Anderson, refers to this as operant conditioning, and says companies can take some steps to help workers change their habits and perhaps regain their brains, or at least some productivity. She recommends things like scheduling daily email time (she notes that companies like Intel tried e-mail free days, but they didn’t work), turning off alert programs, and making sure that your email reader only gives you a subject and the first couple of lines of the email, so you can gauge its importance. She also recommends things like using instant messaging or Twitter. That seems less practical to me — I have stopped following people who Twitter constantly because my phone was buzzing all the time with updates (I decided it was better to stop following because I stuck the phone in a drawer in the kitchen where it wouldn’t bother me, and missed some calls). I turn off IM much of the time because I want to get things done, not be interrupted. I only use it when I’m looking for specific people. I keep Skype off much of the time for the same reason. Her recommendations on using blogs and wikis to collaborate make good sense to me. She does talk about using Flickr as a form of communication, which was a new one on me. I recommend the piece — and that you turn off your e-mail at least some of the time (I’ve had it off for the last hour. The office is strangely peaceful).