Congratulations. You have 1,094 unread messages in your email inbox. And there’s another new email being delivered right now. And now. … And now. … A decade ago, or maybe 15 years ago, people received mail once a day, in the mornings, and we’d check our work messages once a day, in the mornings, and then our home messages once a day, after work. That was back when we got our news twice a day, with the morning paper and the 6 p.m. or 10 p.m. news, and back when cell phones were still an extravagance, when research was still conducted at libraries.
Today, the mail never stops coming. There is no limit to the amount of information and news a person can find, but there is also no limit to the amount of information and news that can find you. For many, email is an addiction. For addicts, the inbox is always open. A new email must be glanced at immediately, whatever else is happening at the time. Just the subject. Just for a second. Then it can be ignored. Addicts get so nervous without their email that phone companies developed iPhones and Blackberries with special interfaces and keyboards to let people send and receive their messages from the grocery store, the cattle ranch, the golf course. Addicts will refresh their inboxes even if their inboxes are set to refresh automatically, on their own, and even if they aren’t expecting any emails. Eventually, addicts may succumb to their inboxes and electronic communications entirely, and fuse together. The condition is called Twitter. It spreads like poison ivy and affects its victims at all hours of the day.
Fortunately, time management experts have developed some techniques for addicts and those overwhelmed by their inboxes to use to take control of their lives back from the information-sharing instruments that are now deemed so necessary for survival.
Why Email Addiction Occurs
There are several theories out there as to why email and electronic communications have such addictive powers. One such theory is that people have been conditioned to check email based on the knowledge that checking email has been rewarding in the past. In behavioral psychology, that is called operant conditioning, which is also how many dog trainers train pets. Taken further, studies have shown that if a behavior is rewarded each and every time, a pet won’t work as hard to get the reward; by rewarding them for a behavior only sometimes, or randomly, instead of each and every time, the pet works harder in hopes of getting the reward. It’s the difference between expectation and anticipation. Checking email is a behavior that produces a reward some times, but not all the time, so a person will check their email often, always hoping that they’ll get a reward.
According to Tom Stafford, the coauthor of the neuropsychology book and Weblog Mind Hacks: Tips and Tricks for Using Your Brain, one way to break that operant conditioning and decrease the amount of time a person wastes on needlessly checking email is to wait, and not immediately check an email after receiving an alert, so that the behavior becomes dissociated with the reward.
Getting Unplugged
According to Austin-based productivity trainer Maura Thomas, successful email management is about mastering control. “You need control over the information you receive on a daily basis, control over the tools that bring you that information, and control over your own behavior,” said Thomas, who founded the Web site RegainYourTime.com. “If you can master control over these three things, you will be the most productive, and the most relaxed, all the time.”
During a lunch and learn session sponsored by the American Society of Association Executives earlier this year, Thomas said it’s important to realize what, exactly, email is and how it is responded to. Most people, she said, operate under a system of reactions; email is a stimulus that creates need for a reaction.
Though email is often considered a time-saver – it’s faster than the United Postal Service, and typing is faster than writing – email doesn’t really save much time for most people, especially when taking into consideration other forms of electronic communication, which is just email in another format: texting, web surfing, Instant Messaging. That’s because email never ends. It’s a hamster’s wheel in which people are being constantly flooded with information while having little time to react to and process that information. When a person doesn’t have time to react to the information they are receiving, finding time to be proactive – to take control – seems difficult, and that’s when email starts causing people to feel stress and confusion, Thomas said.
“Ideally, if you operated at peak productivity, you would spend less time being reactive and more time being proactive,” she said. “(You would) have the ability to assess the best use of your time at any moment and take immediate and appropriate action.” When it comes to how to spend time on email, Thomas’s first recommendation is to focus on doing something else first – preferably something off of a to-do list. Starting off each day by being proactively productive can help break the dependence to email. Instead of checking email with the receipt of each new message, Thomas recommended scheduling time to check email twice a day – but actual time, so that each message can be processed the first time it’s read, or integrated into a to-do list if responding to a particular email will take up too much time.
“Having your email client always open, with messages automatically downloading and giving you an indicator, means that your email is controlling you,” she said. “Turn off the automatic download, so that messages only come in when you click send or receive.” That, she said, puts the control back into a person’s hands and keeps a person from having to constantly multi-task, which is what a person does when they go back and forth between their email notifications and their task-at-hand.
The ability to multi-task is a myth, she added, because humans can’t really actively process more than one or two thoughts simultaneously. That’s why driving a car while using a cell phone is so dangerous.
“We’re actually switching back and forth rapidly between those things. It’s called cognitive switching,” Thomas said, “and the ability to do it peaks around age 20. When switching between two tasks, you are probably giving at most 40 percent of your attention to each of those tasks, and the other 20 percent – at least – is required for the switching. Study after study has shown that switching both lengthens the time it takes to complete a task, and decreases the quality or accuracy of the output.”
Recognizing that most emails tend not to be urgent is important to curing an addiction; most people still turn to the phone for an actual crisis or emergency.
“There are very few industries where it would be unacceptable to for you to go three or four hours without checking your email,” Thomas said.
The most difficult aspect of managing email isn’t urgency, but willpower.
“If your email is always open and always downloading, then nothing ever gets 100 percent of your attention,” she said. “I’m not telling you to never multi-task. I’m just suggesting that you be more selective and more thoughtful about when you do it, rather than having that be your default method of operating.”
During the time that is set aside for checking email, she added that it’s a good idea to devote to at least one minute to every email, whether it’s important or not. If it’s spam or an email from a corporation or vendor, the minute can be spent hitting the “unsubscribe” link, usually featured in tiny print at the bottom of the email. That will keep similar emails from taking up more time in the future, but recognize that the “unsubscribe” button is really only good if the information sent by the vendor or agency isn’t something that a person will want to search for later. Some mailing lists really are time-savers, because they keep a person from having to surf Web sites daily or weekly in search of updates.
A different solution some people use to handling the influx of newsletters, coupons and marketing messages is to have them automatically sent to a separate folder, rather than the inbox, by modifying the existing preferences. (In Microsoft Outlook, for instance, there is a “create rule” option along the top toolbar of an open message, which allows users to automatically move future emails from specific addresses or with specific subjects into a designated folder. The “create rule” tool can also be used to display a New Item Alert window or a sound notification, if emails from certain addresses are always pertinent.)
The downside to bypassing those emails is that they build up, Thomas said.
“It’s bad enough to see how many unread messages are in my inbox. If I had those high numbers in other mailboxes too, it would stress me out,” she said. “Plus it wouldn’t be as efficient if I had to click through a bunch of folders to see what needed my attention. Also, the concern there is that I never get around to looking at some of those folders, so my number of emails grows and grows.” For more important emails, that minute can be spent responding to the email, or at least discovering what it will take to properly respond.
She also recommended spending the minute moving messages out of the inbox. If a message’s contents aren’t required to be saved for open records purposes (see sidebar), it can be deleted. While she doesn’t recommend creating too many other folders – most email clients now have sophisticated search engines that makes taking time to organize email unnecessary – she did recommend creating a “filed” folder and a “to do” folder.
Writing Better Emails
How an email is written and use of email etiquette can also go a long way to reducing the stress associated with receiving and responding to messages.
Studies have shown that every time a person stops what they are doing to check an email, it takes one minute to refocus on the prior task-at-hand – which can add up to a lot of wasted time.
According to Vanguard Technology Vice President of Client Services Chris Bonney, who writes a blog on how to “simplify your ing you to never multi-task. I’m just suggesting that you be more selective and more thoughtful about when you do it, rather than having that be your default method of operating.”
During the time that is set aside for checking email, she added that it’s a good idea to devote to at least one minute to every email, whether it’s important or not. If it’s spam or an email from a corporation or vendor, the minute can be spent hitting the “unsubscribe” link, usually featured in tiny print at the bottom of the email. That will keep similar emails from taking up more time in the future, but recognize that the “unsubscribe” button is really only good if the information sent by the vendor or agency isn’t something that a person will want to search for later. Some mailing lists really are time-savers, because they keep a person from having to surf Web sites daily or weekly in search of updates.
A different solution some people use to handling the influx of newsletters, coupons and marketing messages is to have them automatically sent to a separate folder, rather than the inbox, by modifying the existing preferences. (In Microsoft Outlook, for instance, there is a “create rule” option along the top toolbar of an open message, which allows users to automatically move future emails from specific addresses or with specific subjects into a designated folder. The “create rule” tool can also be used to display a New Item Alert window or a sound notification, if emails from certain addresses are always pertinent.)
To Delete or Not?
For government officials and employees attempting to control their inboxes, it’s important to keep in mind an email’s legal retention period and consult the county’s retention policy. In general, emails that may relate to open records and public information requests cannot be immediately deleted and must be stored, whether within a person’s private email box or on a centralized server.
According to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, a safe policy when it comes to deciding whether an email can be deleted or must be filed is to sort each email into one of six schedules:
According to the schedule:
The downside to bypassing those emails is that they build up, Thomas said.
“It’s bad enough to see how many unread messages are in my inbox. If I had those high numbers in other mailboxes too, it would stress me out,” she said. “Plus it wouldn’t be as efficient if I had to click through a bunch of folders to see what needed my attention. Also, the concern there is that I never get around to looking at some of those folders, so my number of emails grows and grows.” For more important emails, that minute can be spent responding to the email, or at least discovering what it will take to properly respond.
She also recommended spending the minute moving messages out of the inbox. If a message’s contents aren’t required to be saved for open records purposes (see sidebar), it can be deleted. While she doesn’t recommend creating too many other folders – most email clients now have sophisticated search engines that makes taking time to organize email unnecessary – she did recommend creating a “filed” folder and a “to do” folder.
Writing Better Emails
How an email is written and use of email etiquette can also go a long way to reducing the stress associated with receiving and responding to messages.
Studies have shown that every time a person stops what they are doing to check an email, it takes one minute to refocus on the prior task-at-hand – which can add up to a lot of wasted time.
According to Vanguard Technology Vice President of Client Services Chris Bonney, who writes a blog on how to “simplify your experts recommend some simple tips: instead of starting an email with a long introduction or background, start with the action – what is wanted from the reader. Use short paragraphs, so that the reader doesn’t get lost. And utilize an email’s signature function, so that the reader doesn’t have to search for necessary contact information. Bonney recommends utilizing a P.S. structure to bring attention to a particular piece of information.
“I recently sent this as a P.S.,” he blogged. “’I really thought that webinar was great. By the way can you forward me the slides?’ This is an email whose primary message was not answered for another 24 hours, but I had those slides within 20 minutes.”
10 Tips for Reducing Email Stress