The 6 Rules of
Email: How to Eliminate Email Anxiety and Take Control of Your Inbox Today PART
I
In 1971, Raymond Tomlinson, a
computer engineer working at a technology company, Bolt, Beranek and Newman,
was building applications for the ARPANET — the early forerunner
for the modern internet. At the
time, it wasn’t possible to send emails and the computer was neither affordable
nor available to the masses.
Tomlinson and his colleagues had
built a messaging program, Sndmsg, which allowed users of a single computer to
send messages to one another one. They were also toying around with the idea of
building some sort of mailbox protocol, where engineers working on the ARPANET
could communicate with each other.
One day, in a Cambridge,
Massachusetts, lab, Tomlinson stood in front of two computer machines that at
the time resembled a large typewriter.
In one computer, Tomlinson typed up
a message, “TESTING 1 2 3 4,”on the program Sndmsg. He directed this message to
the second computer, separating the user name and destination address using the
@ sign. A few moments later the first email was sent from one host computer to
another.
Nearly five decades and billions of
emails later, Tomlinsons’ seemingly innocent email discovery has evolved into a
major cause of stress, anxiety and low productivity for millions of people
across the globe. Several studies have shown that checking email frequently
leads to higher levels of cortisol, a hormone associated with stress.
Multitasking between email and work has also been shown to
significantly reduce productivity and work performance by creating “attention residue” — the reduction of cognitive performance from switching
your attention.
Multitasking expert, Gloria Mark, a
professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, highlights
these negative effects of email multitasking based on an extensive study into the costs of
interrupted work:
“We found about 82
percent of all interrupted work is resumed on the same day. But here’s the bad
news — it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task.”
That’s 23 minutes and 15 seconds
lost per interruption! Given we’re interrupted several times at
work, we’re losing productive hours each day to email distractions or even
months each year.
In a desperate attempt to tame our
email inbox, we’ve resorted to several overwhelming strategies including inbox
zero, complicated folder organizing systems and software, but these only
compound our existing stress and anxiety.
Instead, here are six of the best
strategies to help you eliminate email anxiety and take control your inbox
today.
1. Avoid organizing emails using
folders
Contrary to popular advice,
extensively organizing and sorting your emails using folders could be
counterproductive for your productivity and well-being.
In an extensive, large sample
size study conducted
by Steve Whittaker, an expert in human-computer interaction and researchers at
IBM, over 85,000 attempts to sort and find emails were tracked and measured.
During the field study, several
hundred office workers used several methods to manage their emails. Some
workers used folders to sort their emails, others scrolled through their inbox
sorting by senders, or using the search function.
After several months of studying
the various workers email strategies and their efficiencies, Whittaker and the
research team combined and analysed the data.
They found that clicking through a
folder tree took almost a minute, while simply searching took just 17 seconds.
In other words, the office workers who relied on a tidy structure of complex
folders to retrieve information took longer than those who used the search
function of the email provider.
Whittaker provides an explanation
to this surprising finding:
“Instead we found that
filing seems to be a reaction to receiving many messages. Users receiving many messages
were more likely to create folders, possibly because this serves to rationalize
their inbox, allowing them to better see their ‘todos’.
Interview data confirms
that people file to clean their inboxes to facilitate task management. This
result contradicts prior work arguing that people who receive many messages do
not have the time to create folders.”
This study doesn’t imply that we
can’t use folders to organize our emails by priorities. But, it does highlight our
tendencies to use email as a way to feel good and complete
tasks that aren’t necessarily important.
2. Forget inbox zero, set
expectations instead
Inbox zero — the popular email
management process of keeping the email inbox empty at all times — is a sure-fire way of
wasting time sorting emails, instead of completing important work.
The problem with inbox zero is that
it feels good in the short-term to empty our email inboxes. In fact, according
to Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist who specializes in irrational human
behavior, email is a near-perfect random rewards system.
In other words, Inbox Zero is an
addictive game, where the scoreboard of your progress is the number of emails
left unread and unsorted in your email inbox. The higher the number, the worse
you feel and the lower the number, the better you feel.
The compulsion to empty our email
inboxes is an addictive habit that makes us feel like we’re making progress and
getting things done, but in reality, we’re wasting precious time that could be
spent on our most important tasks.
There’s a better approach to
managing emails. In the book, Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions,
and Get Real Work Done, the alternative solution involves the use and
understanding of the physics of email.
As a brief review, Newton’s First
Law of Motion states that “An object either remains at rest or continues to
move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by an external force.” In
addition, Newton’s Third Law of Motion suggests that for every action there
will be an equal and opposite reaction.
These laws apply in our use of
email in everyday life. Specifically, email sets expectations between the
sender and receiver that affects future actions or ‘motion.’
For example, if you regularly
respond to a client or colleague within 10 minutes of receiving their emails,
they’ll begin to expect that you respond quickly to their emails.
Overtime, you’ll receive more
emails which may not require your urgent attention, but the sender may get
upset if you don’t reply within 10 minutes. And the more emails you send, the
more emails you’ll receive. This expectation of quick replies to incoming emails
leads to a constant state of email anxiety, overwhelm and burnout.
The best way to set stress-free
expectations is to politely and publicly communicate your availability to
respond to emails with your colleagues, clients and bosses.
Let them know the time periods of
the day when you’ll be too busy to check email and those when you’ll be free to
do so. The longer you stick to these schedules, the more external parties will
adjust their expectations to match yours.
By publicly declaring expectations
of your future email interactions, you can create healthy boundaries that allow
you to focus on meaningful work, whilst managing your important relationships.
Mayo
Oshin
https://medium.com/the-mission/the-6-rules-of-email-how-to-eliminate-email-anxiety-and-take-control-of-your-inbox-today-backed-b57d8ea278f2
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