Occasionally I stumble across a blog posting that sums up exactly what I think and how I feel about a subject that I am passionate about. I love such serendipity. Today is such a day.
My friendfeed.com Information Overload group RSS feed just alerted me to the following post that originally appeared on Duke Today, The Duke community’s daily news and information resource.
The article describes themes that will be familiar to the regular reader of this blog:
- some horrifying statistics that highlight the plight of untamed e-mail
- the anxiety created by information overload as a result of untamed e-mail
- the over-dependence upon e-mail
- the amount of time it takes the average person to manage e-mail per day
- the improper use of e-mail based on poor e-mail behaviour and etiquette
- strategies for avoiding information overload
- and most interestingly, and not often discussed - or even thought out loud - the psychological traits displayed by people addicted to e-mail, and how our e-mail behaviour is similar to that of conditioned laboratory rats.
These are all issues I have addressed in previous posts, or, as is the case with the addiction aspect, will cover in future posts. Therefore I decided to copy the original post in its entirety here as it fits in so well with the raison d’etre of The Productivity Paradox.
Sue Wasiolek, Duke’s dean of students and assistant vice president for student affairs, checks e-mail every six minutes. “An unanswered e-mail in my inbox screams at me,” she said.
Overcoming E-mail Overload
Faculty and staff are spending increasingly more time checking, responding to e-mail
By Cara Bonnett
Monday, November 3, 2008
DURHAM, NC For Sue Wasiolek, an empty e-mail inbox provides the same sense of accomplishment as finishing an eight-mile run.
As Duke’s dean of students and assistant vice president for student affairs, Wasiolek receives more than 200 e-mails daily.
“An unanswered e-mail in my inbox screams at me,” Wasiolek said. “I don’t know if it’s an addiction or a self-imposed stressor, but I treat almost every e-mail as though it’s an overdue bill.”
Wasiolek checks e-mail at least every six minutes, either on her laptop or iPhone. During meetings. While driving. At all hours of the night.
And she’s not alone.
E-mail By the Numbers
51% E-mail users nationwide who check e-mail four or more times daily
20% Users with more than 300 e-mails in inboxes
62% Users who check work e-mail over a weekend
41% Mobile e-mail users who keep cell phones near them when they sleep
67% E-mail users who check e-mail in pajamas in bed
Source: AOL Mail’s fourth annual e-mail addiction survey, July 2008.
Nearly half of all Americans say they’re hooked on e-mail, according to a recent AOL mail survey, and Duke staff and faculty are spending increasingly more of their workday checking and responding to it. The ease and convenience of e-mail have prompted overuse, overdependence and information overload. But don’t blame technology for fragmented attention and growing anxiety, as today’s workers struggle to keep up with their constantly beeping inboxes. We have no one to blame but ourselves, experts say.
“Most people let their e-mail manage them. They don’t manage it,” said Tim Pyatt, Duke’s university archivist and co-principal investigator of a four-year study of e-mail use at Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It’s just amazing how it’s come to dominate the workforce.”
Pyatt now estimates that Duke faculty and staff spend as much as four hours a day on e-mail, up from the average 111 minutes a day Duke staff reported in his fall 2002 survey.
While tougher spam filters and other technological advances cut down on junk e-mail and help users better sort and search through the digital deluge, experts say the real problem with e-mail isn’t volume but etiquette and rising expectations in a 24/7 culture.
“As technological performance gets better and servers deliver e-mail quickly, one side effect is that people have come to expect that other people will respond that quickly, too,” said Rob Carter, a consultant with Duke’s Office of Information Technology.
Indeed, Duke users get fewer e-mails than they did just a year ago, due to tougher spam filtering implemented earlier this year. On an average day at Duke, OIT delivers about 1.5 million e-mails and blocks more than 22 million spam messages.
Still, users feel overloaded because they rely too much on e-mail, using it as a tool for quick conversation and sharing comments on documents, instead of what it was designed to be: the electronic equivalent of a postal mailbox, Carter said.
“It’s the equivalent of paper mail: a self-documenting, permanent record,” Carter said. “It’s designed to be reliable but not instant and conversational.”
With the ease and convenience of e-mail, senders too often press “send” without considering the effect of their interruptions on others – and recipients feel a mounting sense of pressure to respond quickly.
“We’re polluting the pool, and we don’t see the cost,” said Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and author of the Predictably Irrational blog. “When you’re carbon-copying 30 people on an e-mail, you’ve just stolen 30 seconds of 30 people’s lives. If we had to pay 25 cents per e-mail, we’d think more carefully about what we wrote, and probably write fewer e-mails.”
Ariely faces a unique challenge: His hand was damaged in an accidental explosion that left him with third-degree burns over 70 percent of his body, and typing actually causes physical pain. He’s made repeated efforts to reduce his time at the keyboard but admits he can’t resist checking his iPhone while in line at the store and at red lights.
E-mail motivates humans the same way random schedules of reinforcement motivated rats in experiments conducted by behaviorist researcher B.F. Skinner, Ariely said. People check inboxes obsessively in the small but irresistible hope of reward: an important e-mail that requires immediate response.
“Most e-mails are not that urgent or useful, but there’s that small chance that it’s important, that you’ve hit the jackpot,” Ariely said. “It’s very hard to let it go.”
E-mail also can be addictive because processing it offers a false sense of accomplishment, Ariely said: “E-mail gives you a sense of progression and is instantly rewarding, but it can expand to take up your entire life.”
In the corporate world, e-mail overload has led to concerns about diminishing productivity, prompting a group of technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel and Google, to band together to devise solutions. Intel has experimented with e-mail free Fridays, and Google unveiled a Gmail feature that locks users out of e-mail for short periods of time.
But e-mail, which has been around at Duke since the mid-1980s, isn’t going away anytime soon.
“I’m a firm believer in e-mail,” said Provost Peter Lange, who receives about 100 messages on an average day. “A lot of my work is communicating with other people. When you’re just doing business, it’s amazingly efficient. But you need to balance it with face-to-face and telephone communication and know when to use which, with whom and for what purpose.”
When it comes to avoiding e-mail overload, different strategies work for different individuals. Productivity guru Merlin Mann, author of the 43folders.com blog, advocates developing “ninja inbox habits.”
“Do not live in your inbox or use your inbox as a to-do list or a calendar,” Mann said during a presentation at Duke. “It’s a delivery system, not a place to manage your tasks.”
OIT’s Carter, whose inbox typically numbers more than 120,000 messages (mostly automated server updates for the many computer systems he monitors), touts this rule: “Employ all the spam filtering you can, to avoid ever being interrupted by a message you’re not going to read.”
Ed Gomes, associate dean for arts and sciences information technology, takes advantage of automatic sorting features to organize his e-mail by category. “I also make a concerted effort to go through e-mail once a week to make sure I haven’t missed anything,” Gomes said.
But for Wasiolek, nothing beats staying on top of that insistent ding – even if it means “conversing” with students through e-mail at 4:30 a.m.
“This generation of students equates a quick response to e-mail with a high sense of caring: If you respond quickly to their e-mail, they believe you care about them,” she said. “Each incoming e-mail is like a phone ringing. You don’t just let it ring.”
— By Cara Bonnett
Managing Editor, News & Information Office of Information Technology
I have often observed that the very same people who complain that their inboxes are overflowing, appear to be secretly pleased with that situation. My personal explanation for this observation was that it makes them feel important. This is a thought I keep to myself. Upon reading the article above I felt reassured to notice the author referring to something similar. Furthermore, I recognise the explanation of the underlying urge to check e-mail, that almost desperate hope that you will find a gem in your inbox that will give you a fleeting sense of gratification. I am sure you will also recognise this phenomenon.
Very much like a drug addict looking for a fix. Scary huh?
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