Email Is Not Addictive If You Treat It Right

This week we’ve seen a few articles discussing all the dangers of addiction to email and how it damages our daily work. Sure, there is no doubt that email can be addictive and can grow into a real problem - but only on condition that we can not handle it properly. But I strongly feel that calling email addictive is simply not fair - it is nothing but a communication tool and there’s no need to blame the tool for the unhealthy habits we have for using it.

I have decided to state here the most common problems stated in the study referenced by The Sidney Morning Herald related to email addiction and show that the problems themselves immediately hint at solutions to recover. So it is only up to us to behave wisely or to stick to questionable practices that are referred to as email addiction.

Interruption

It takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email.

Whenever you switch browser tabs or take a quick look at your desktop email client to see what’s new, you will need some time to recover and resume the interrupted task with the same level of efficiency. So if you check your emails too often, you may very well lose tons of time every day simply on this process of recovery. There is no doubt that this time can be used more efficiently.

Solution:

Develop a habit to only check email between different tasks and never allow yourself to go check if there’s anything new in your inbox until you complete one task and before you start working on another. The easy way to do it is to have a written list of all your daily tasks that includes all the things you are supposed to do during the day and allow yourself to check email only between different tasks - and never when your work on a task is in progress.

In this case email will not be an interruption since you won’t have to resume thinking about what you were working on before venturing to your inbox. What’s more, checking your email will serve as a kind of a pleasant break in your regular activities that you eagerly wait for so it will be similar to having a cigarette or a coffee break - but often shorter and will have less negative impact on your health.

This is a very simple solution actually - you just have to realize that you should not be obsessed with a compulsion to constantly check your emails and only do it with the frequency that is appropriate for the task - not every time that your subconscious mind reminds you that you have an inbox (or two).

It is even better if you can actually impose a certain schedule for checking your emails so that the process takes certain times throughout the day when you know you are supposed to deal with new messages instead of checking new emails constantly and distracting yourself. If you can allow yourself to set two certain timeframes during the day (say, first thing in the morning and an hour before you leave the office), it will be perfect not to allow yourself to continue checking if there’s anything new outside of those timeframes.

But if your work heavily relies on tons of important things arriving by email and you actually need to react more frequently, simply use the above approach not to interrupt tasks and turn emails into separate tasks that receive attention exactly when they are supposed to.

Immediate actions

People tend to respond to emails almost immediately after they receive notifications of new messages with 70% getting a reaction from the recipient within 6 seconds (which is faster than letting your phone ring three times).

We have developed a very questionable approach of dealing with emails instantly as if something really crucial depends on them or if a message may destroy itself if left unread for a few minutes. And of course if you then switch back to a previous task after dealing with an email (even if far from urgent), it will take longer to recover.

Solution:

There are three solutions to this problem. The first one is to make yourself believe that no one (or at least rarely anyone) expects to receive a reply to emails within the first few minutes and usually the proper etiquette is to react to your messages on the same day that you receive them - but not immediately. After all, people that need to have immediate reaction from you will be able to use any of the available instant communication tools available - phone or instant messaging. Simply persuade yourself that nothing terrible will happen if you allow yourself a more lengthy timeframe to deal with the newly arrived emails.

While the first solution is mostly related to training your brain, the other two are simply technical and don’t require any willpower to implement - at the same time simply giving you a chance to behave according to what you have made yourself believe in the step one.

So the first technical solution is to disable all instant notifications of new messages in your inbox. I am absolutely sure that no matter what email client you use, you will still have a way to make it stop reminding you every time a new email hits your inbox. Better yet, if you can configure notifications to be enabled for only certain messages, do that to be able to react instantly to what really matters - not just absolutely everything. But you will need to choose those types of messages that deserve instant notifications very carefully not to let any messages that don’t deserve it get past the selection process. I also hope that email clients and protocols of the future will allow people to communicate urgency in addition to the message itself - so that we will immediately know if a sender actually expects us to react within minutes or if it is not particularly urgent and can wait until your next email session arrives.

Finally, the third solution is to have your email signature reflecting where exactly a person will be able to find you if there’s a need for an immediate reply. Add your IM accounts and/or your phone number to the signature so that any person that has already received an email from you could know where to reach you when the question is really urgent. And if someone contacts you for the first time and does not have any other contact details but email (probably publicly available), I think this person will hardly expect you to reply instantly and will be perfectly fine waiting for your reply to arrive a few hours.

So if you implement the technical solutions and make yourself believe no one will die if you don’t reply to every single message instantly, you will easily allow yourself not to rush to reply to every single new message instantly and will only send replies when your next email checking session is scheduled.

As some sort of a conclusion (and a personal observation) I wanted to mention that even if you yourself don’t want to admit your addiction to email, there are easy ways for other people to figure out that you are addicted (and badly so). I have a very easy way to spot the people that are addicted - these are the contacts that whenever I befriend them on some social network of the day, reciprocate immediately, i.e. exactly when a notification hits their inboxes. And I immediately realize that these people spend all day constantly checking their inboxes - and I feel sorry for them because I know that such habits can ruin their work completely.

As a personal solution, I have a special folder in my inbox where all the bacn massages land in (those are email notifications from dozens of social networks I have accounts with) and I only allow myself to check that folder once a day - never more frequently. And I know people will hardly think I am rude if I don’t reciprocate on Twitter or on FriendFeed within minutes of their subscription to me. What’s more, I would not really want to know someone to figure out I am addicted to email by getting constant “followed you back” notifications. And maybe if nothing else helps, knowing that someone else can suspect you are addicted could be the ultimate solution for you.

Photo by Mzelle Biscotte used under Creative Commons