Slashdot Mirror
British Report Details the Stress of Email Communication
WaltonNews writes "British researchers have found that pressures from handling emails throughout the work day cause stress and frustration with workers. Researchers from a pair of collaborating universities have found that heavy email communication causes anxiety, with some workers thinking they checked their email as often as once every fifteen minutes. The reality was much worse. From the article: 'When researchers fitted monitors to their computers, workers were found to be viewing e-mails up to 40 times an hour. About 33 per cent said they felt stressed by the volume of e-mails and the need to reply quickly. A further 28 per cent said they felt "driven" when they checked messages because of the pressure to respond. Just 38 per cent of workers were relaxed enough to wait a day or longer before replying.'"
I just don't care that much about my job. What's with people stressing out so much about some e-mail?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I'd like to see a report on the stress of Slashdot communication. I probably fall into the "Obsessive F5ers" category.
I don't know about most of you, but if I don't respond to an email pretty much when I get it, then I'm much more likely to forget to reply to it. That's part of the reason I compulsively check email and respond to it immediately. I don't think it's stressful though.
Are you sure that 38% was "relaxed" enough, or were they just blowing off the writer?
A bigger question is: Who polls their email client at work anymore? All of the modern clients have some sort of pop-up that will notify you when you have new mail, often with a tiny excerpt from the mail right in the window so you know if you need to read it or not. The only time I actually check the client is when I've been away from the desk for awhile and want to see what I've missed. There is no reason to keep opening up the client and manually pressing refresh.
Also, in my experiance if someone who is in the office doesn't reply to your email within a few hours they probably never will.
I read the internet for the articles.
If I wait a day to respond to emails at work, I will get an email from my manager asking why I haven't responded to Most coworkers can't wait for email. They IM and expect immediate response.
Yeah, I use emails often, but i see it as a tool and nothing more. there is no reason to get stressed over using tools. Do you stress out over using a hammer? if not, then why emails? is this because of human interaction?
Seriously, who "checks" their email these days? I just assumed everyone used gmail notifier, or outlook, or kontact, or thunderbird, or one of the zillion other programs that tell you when you have new email.
Nowadays it seems like you need to be responding to any email within about 1 hour. Anything else is considered almost rude.
Some people have anxiety when taking a flight, going out of their houses, being in confined spaces, etc. And some people have anxiety with e-mail, nothing new here, move along.
Slashdot, maybe, but email? Hard to believe.
to everyone in my .mailrc. Then I will read about whats the matter with the emails.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The study didn't even take into account whether the emails in question were urgent or not. Maybe the problem is that everyone is so overworked, not that the work is coming in email. If the messages weren't urgent, but people were as obsessed as that study concludes, then its conclusions would be valid. But if they are urgent, is that the fault of email? Has everyone been stressed out for a century by "the telephone", or by the transformation of our jobs into ones that are largely talking with each other about delegated and collaborated production work?
Are they freaked out that people are "driven" to get into cars and trains every day, sometimes for hours, as part of our work?
Really, what is the baseline against which this "abnormal email stress" is being measured? I suspect that it's the usual imaginary baseline in "the good old days" that tabloid newspapers have been inventing since... the good old days.
--
make install -not war
Email is the "situational awareness" of the workplace. I don't understand how having better visibility, through better communications, is "more stressful". To me, it is empowering and makes me feel BETTER about being on top of things. To me, it is far more stressful "being in the dark" - I'd rather be "in the know". I guess for some people ignorance really is bliss.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Of course they start checking their email frantically once the mean old researchers give the workers their monitors back.
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
like a phone call, yeah, it can drive you bats. The thing about e-mail is that you can read it and leave it until/if you want to compose an answer. A problem some people have is they feel they have to answer each e-mail as if the person was right in front of them. If something begs an answer I usually give it to them. If it is important, I phone. In a lot of offices, e-mail has replaced memos which rarely required an answer, immediate or otherwise.
Myself, if the e-mail has no subject, I delete it, it is is just a statement without a question, I delete it. After that, judge accordingly. People make their own stress. It's almost like a drug.
Maybe they've got it backwards. Personally, I spend a lot of my day hitting the "check new mail" button - if somebody mails me, I can respond to that, rather than doing actual work.
Peter
how people feel so much pressure to be in touch all the time. No, I am not a CEO nor do I run a NOC, where I can see how near instant communication can be critical. I suspect that most people have some psychological need to be always available.
I will check my email if I am expecting something important. Everyone I deal with knows how to get in touch with me if something unexpected comes up. I once had an office mate that would email me a simple yes/no question if I was in the restroom at the time rather than wait 30 seconds to ask me in person- and then ask me to check my email when I returned from said restroom. And it wasn't important so as to need a paper trail, it had to do with something like did I get some memo.
It seems like everyone has forgot how to speak and would prefer an Outer Limits episode where everyone is WiFied into a central Skynet contraption. Look at the huge uproar that occurred by banning college football coaches from texting prospective recruits.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
...check my email. Be right back.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
At my old job I was always getting a steady stream of emails. The way I handled it was by setting up filters in Outlook to separate things into folders/subfolders (thankfully many of my emails were machine-generated due to various event triggers, which made this whole system possible). I also set Outlook not to auto-mark messages as read--I had to do it myself. I would then use this arrangement of folders to prioritize my workload. When I responded to a message or completed the task it outlined, I would mark it read. It made for a very convenient way to measure my workload in different categories (4 messages in folder X, 11 in folder Y, 2 in folder Z--Let's knock out folder Y first). This also ensured that I responded to every single email, instead of seeing more than a few slip through the cracks because I forgot about them (which seemed to happen to just about everyone else in the office at some point or another).
This guy's the limit!
When researchers fitted monitors to their computers, workers were found to be viewing e-mails up to 40 times an hour
Well, duh! I'm guessing that workers without monitors fitted to their computers not only rarely checked their e-mail, but could not do much of anything with their computers.
I'm at a remote site, on a customer's network. If they are having that much stress and spending that much time checking email, but them on a web based client, it'll slow them down bigtime.../grumbles about OWA...
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
Who polls their email client at work anymore?
I was wondering the same thing. What is this "checking" they speak of? I don't even need to check Gmail. I can minimize the window and tell at a glance at the taskbar if there's a new message or not. and Outlook has the friendly pop up with summary. I can glance at the email and decide if I need to even read the whole thing or not.
I think this article is long on hysteria and short on common sense. Consider this:
About 33 per cent said they felt stressed by the volume of e-mails and the need to reply quickly. A further 28 per cent said they felt "driven" when they checked messages because of the pressure to respond. Just 38 per cent of workers were relaxed enough to wait a day or longer before replying.
I think that for may people email replaces phone conversations. Who at work feels like they can just ignore the phone on a regular basis? Who feels that you can leisurely return a call after waiting longer than a day? In short: how much of this stress has anything to do with email and how much is just the stress of rapid communication no matter what form it's in? The important variable is not an individual's attitude towards email, it's what their job requires from them in terms of responsiveness. I'm an analyst. I can frequently delay an email up to a week if it's on a back-burner project. If the sales guys wait a day to call their clients and prospects back (or return an email) they are in trouble.
It has nothing to do with my personality vs. the sales guy, it's the nature of analytic work vs. services/sales work.
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
That's nothing, the last place I worked as the only computer tech they had, they insisted I set everyone's outlook to automatically check for messages every 1 minute. They were quite appalled when I told them that was the smallest increment Outlook would let them, they originally wanted it ever 15 seconds. What's sad is most of them will sit and hammer the send/receive button furiously.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
You mean they didn't already have them?
Most of the "sky is falling" articles come from the UK especially global warming. I immediately discount any news article from UK.
I rarely do a manual check of my e-mail. I let other software monitor my e-mail. Aside from the content, I do not stress over the sending/receiving/replying of e-mail. In fact it eases stress by not checking e-mail.
Depending on my workload, I respond to short/easy e-mails within fifteen minutes. Everything else gets some sort of reply by the end of the business day (but not necessarily a solution).
If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0.
At my company, email is the primary communication mechanism. I easily get over 100 emails a day that should be responded to by someone, with about 50% of them being "group" mails to more than one person, or to an entire team, which I may or may not respond to directly depending on if I have anything to say.
None of these are "to do" items, they are part of a conversation flow that has to take place between the team and the management in order to get things done. Some companies do this in group meetings, some do it in a top-down delegation approach. Mine does it with email. As such, I check my email around every 2-3 minutes at least, quickly scanning the inbox for messages that pertain to me.
I don't feel it "stressful" though - it is part of the job.
This is why I think stories like this are pointless. You can't take any group of people and generally classify them as checking email too often or too little unless you know the specifics of their job and company and how they use email in their day-to-day life. 150 emails in one day is nothign to me, but I know people in other jobs who would be freaked out if they had to deal with 5 per hour.
To: security@forensicts.co.uk
Subject: Stolen server
Have you found our stolen server yet? I emailed you about it two hours ago and haven't heard back from you yet.
Regards,
Mildred T. Winterbottom, CEO
The Banjo Players Must Die!
Actually I have been trying to convince coworkers that if they need something immediately and it is a something I can answer off the top of my mind without interrupting what I am doing just IM. Reserve email for issues which will need me to stop what I am working on and spend some time writing an answer and in such cases expect a reply by eod or next day not immediately.
I am still obsessive about checking email so now I have taken to completely shutting down outlook and starting it once every hour.
Filters help and they would work even better if people would use the low importance flag on articles and jokes they forward. Dont get me wrong I appreciate the forwards but the flag would let me know its something I can look at at the eod.
**Life is too short to be serious**
I second... or third that. Checking e-mail? That's so 1990's. But, seriously, I would suggest poor communication skills as more of a stress inducing aspect of e-mail. How many people do you know can effectively communicate through e-mail without several successive replies? Telephone and face-to-face conversations are usually much more effective when one party doesn't communicate well. If someone sends me an e-mail which doesn't make sense to begin with, I don't waste time trying to extract their meaning through e-mail. I do a face-to-face. It's a lot less frustrating.
This just in....work is stressful.
I generally keep my inbox clear. The only things in my inbox are things I need to get back to. Email is nice, because I can get back to them as-needed.
However, at my current job, my inbox is a 10 page mess. This isn't because I don't manage email properly - it's a symptom of the organization. Email doesn't cause stress any more than phone calls or postal mail. It becomes stressful if the job is stressful.
You think e-mail gives you stress?
/. it keeps saying 'Use 'em or lose 'em'. Now that's what I call stress.
I've got 4 mod points left and everytime I log onto
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
If it came through e-mail, it's not important, because if it were important, the person would have called. Therefore, no e-mail is worth stopping what I was doing to respond.
QED.
For example, as I typed this Dell managed to get some spam through to me. I'll be ignoring that shortly.
With our commincation process changing from Face to Face conversations, to Hard line Phone conversations, to Mobile phone (on the go) discussions, to Faxes, to Electonic documents, to Email, to Blackberry mail, to IM Text messages, and now to Phone text messages. Email is easy.
This makes you start to wonder how much of this email is truely work related? Friends, Family, e-vites, Amazon, e-bay, spam, and other such non-work related emails, or all work related???
Now I can understand if this is the new trend in Work emails where higher managers are trying to drive complete projects with 1 sentence emails that usually end up in the subject line (so they fit on a Blackberry). I know of a company that I used to work at that has managers doing that.
Another question one might ask, how much time could have been saved with a 5 minute Face to Face rather than 40+ emails? Face to face reduces so much stress in people, you can read emotions, facial expressions. One can't do that as easily in emails.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Just 38% were "relaxed enough" to wait a day or more to answer the phone, too. Hope you like hold music.
Seriously, is this all that bad? I check my mail whenever I have an idle cycle or three, and that often means that I get things done sooner rather than later. Similarly, probably the biggest single waste of time in my day is waiting on responses to things that I really wanted a response on soon.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I would like to know how workers used their computers before "researchers fitted monitors to their computers". I've tried to use my computer without any monitors, and its hard to use the mouse without them. I guess if you don't want the stress of email communication at work, you just have to remove the monitors from your computer, problem solved!
I think a lot of people like to over-inflate the importance of their work. Pissant office workers from low level managers to data entry workers to mail room clerks enjoy furrowing their brow a lot and pretending that the economies of several western nations may come crashing down if they don't do their job. These are people whose sense of self worth comes from their job, they fail to realize that for people in their position, working is simply a means to an end.
These are the people that stress about email and check it every 30 seconds. It's not because they feel they have to, it's because (possibly subconsciously) they want to. The more stressful their job is (in their mind) the more important their job is and the more important they are. Personally, I do my job and I do it well, but I don't get stressed about anything. It's not worth it.
I also find email can be a stress reliever. I get a lot of emails that deal with routine issues. If I have some complicated decision or other source of stress, it can be useful to just devote half an hour or so to dealing with routine stuff, which is varied enough to take my mind off of the day's crisis. Frequently, by the time I'm done, the answer I am seeking pops into my head.
Seems like one of the popular business fads of the moment is "having a sense of urgency". Have you heard this one? Your boss or executive manager probably has this buzz-phrase in his vocabulary. Everything is "urgent" now: From project completion to making your numbers, to handling unexpected events, to your everyday communication. URGENT! URGENT!! Every E-mail MUST be responded to, instantly! URGENT! Your competitors check their E-mail 20 times an hour, so it's urgent that you check 40 times an hour!! Every communication is of top importance, every bug is priority one, every E-mail is URGENT!
I've seen offices where you'd get an E-mail, and if you didn't respond within a few minutes, you'd get an I.M. and if you didn't respond to that within a few seconds, it's a telephone call, and if you don't answer, someone will breathlessly rush to your desk to ask you face-to-face what flavor of coffee should get brewed next in the break room.
No wonder people are getting stressed out. I think it's URGENT that we all take a break and realize that your business is not going to go up in flames if you relax and have normal paced communications.
These are some strange findings...
I prefer email precisely because i can respond at my leisure, as opposed to a phonecall where you really are on the spot and forced to reply immediately. I will often take my time responding to email, thinking of what to write and the best way to get my point across. On the phone you dont have such time to think, thats why a lot of aggressive people (headhunters, salesmen) prefer to call you.
Also, why bother checking email repeatedly, does your mail client not notify you in some way when you have new mail?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
This article is a lot about people like me.
I'm in a mildly technical role, no development or anything like that - essentially I'm a product manager. On a day between 9am and 6pm I will receive, on average, one email just under every 3 minutes (about 180+ a day). Of these, about 50% of them are directed at me which require a response. 10% are from members of my team which are outward communication that I need to know about because, as the product manager, if someone asks you a question, they expect you to know the answer. 40% of them are chains.
I spend, on average, 20 hours a week in meetings. That means that over the course of a week 400 emails arrive when I'm not physically at my computer. Of which 200 require a response from me.
As an addition to the meetings, I have to actually do some work. However for every three minutes I'm working on a proposition document, roadmap, presentation or what-have-you, another email has dropped into my inbox.
Messages on group distribution lists aren't counted. They're filtered away and I only rarely read them - as a consequence, I often miss out on company information. When I went on holiday three months ago for two weeks, upon my return, I moved all emails sent during that time into a separate folder which I would go back and review once I'd done the more recent stuff. With this I assumed that 80% of people would have got the answer they wanted whilst I was away. Fast forward to today and I haven't touched the folder. It still contains the 1,921 emails. All unread.
At present my inbox has 458 emails, 381 of them are unread and 77 are marked for follow-up. I use the conversation mode in Outlook to easily spot conversation threads and jump over them. I colour messages with me in the cc grey so that I don't prioritise them over the ones in blue which are directed at me. Ones from key people (my boss, board members, marketing) are in a different colour for importance. I don't have the pop-up telling me every time I have new email otherwise I'd never be able to work. I check email and respond when I can.
My turn around for email (assuming I do it in strict order) is a response about three days after it was sent and, for many people, it isn't good enough. I've been told I need to get that down to the point when I can respond in less than an hour. If I reverse it and start at the most recent, then people complain that I haven't responded to their earlier email.
This is inbox overload. It's hell.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
See subject.
Actually, I'd rather poll my e-mail a few times a day than have every new e-mail announce itself (distracting me from whatever I was doing). For me, the point of e-mail is that it's not the phone.
When researchers fitted monitors to their computers, workers were found to be viewing e-mails up to 40 times an hour.
Workers using computers without monitors checked their e-mail far less often.
I'm sure the Mandarins of low impact multicultural fat free no smoking bike helmets for everyone in the UK will soon pass a law limiting the number of emails one is allowed to see in a day with harsh penalties if they exceed that.
> Just 38 per cent of workers were relaxed enough to wait a day or longer before replying.'
They were called, "management."
Bark less. Wag more.
I further care about those people who freak out over e-mail. A decade ago they were freaking out over phone messages and checking them every 15. COD. So what?
I check digg and /. more than I check my email.
I used to work for an outfit where managers refused to leave messages on e-mail, voicemail, pagers, call outside numbers (cell phones, for example) or write memos. If employees didn't pick up their phones at any time, they'd throw a fit. Now that's stress.
Have gnu, will travel.
I try to pidgeonhole all my emails. This is needed since I get a TON of automated emails from machines telling me about builds, and status of testing of emails. Those are so predictable I can get outlook filter them easily.
The problem I ran into is the frenzy of "out of the office" emails for telecommuting. Everyone around here has a unique way of expressing that they are not in the office. Instead of a nice "OOTO TC"-prefixed email, I get "W@H"," out of the office","OTOO","offline for a bit". It's like they are trying to dodge my filters, as if it was spam. Worse yet are the "I'm going out to lunch" emails, as if we needed to know the whereabouts of you every 5 minutes. I get these emails literally every 10 minutes. It clogs up the "unread mails" folder too.
Yes, my "OOTO Spam" MS Outlook rule grows by the week with new subject line headers. Anything to jam on that "you have unopened items" sys tray icon in Outlook that seems impossible to shut down via rules.
I have a notification which presents itself in the system tray, rather than as a pop-up. The pop-up exists by default, but you can turn it off. This seems to work best since I don't have to "poll" every so often, I'm still notified, and I'm not interrupted. It's probably the one feature of... well, I'd rather not say which e-mail client my org uses... okay... it's Lotus Notes, alright!
That is a very interesting point. I would like to mention... Hang on...
[checks email]
In this day, with mobile computing on the rise...Hang on...
[checks email]
What are the social implications of...Hang on... [checks email]
Nevermind, someone just sent me the video of the monkey peeing in his own mouth, I've gotta watch!
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
When something is important enough that it requires an IMMEDIATE response, reach for the phone and dial the number. When you use EMail with me, you accept that I answer as soon as the situation warrants it.
EMail is useful, but two things it is not:
First and foremost, a way to transfer files. Put the item in question on some server and send a link. The overhead is really amazing when sending content via mail that doesn't consist entirely of text (and yes, this includes Word-Files, dear managers!).
And second, an immediate response medium. EMail is neither phone nor IM. If anything, it's quite a lot like an answering machine. You get, at best, the information that your message has been stored and will be relayed to your communication partner as soon as he gets time to check his "answering machine" (or inbox). Just the fact that some mail was sent is in no way ensuring that whoever received it also immediately reads it.
Dear managers of this planet: Start using the proper tools for the proper application. Use IM or phone for a two way communication. Use mail for one way information transfer. Use FTP for data transfer.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
With e-mail, at least I know what the sender wants, and decide accordingly if, when, and how to respond. But when the phone rings, all I know is whether it's Corporate, a colleague on-site, or an off-site call. Worse is the "Message Waiting" light: Generally, that means someone wants to sell me something, or Corporate wants to introduce stress into my otherwise serene worklife.
And way too often, the message is "I have a question, call me when you get this." WTF? What's the damn question? Why didn't you ask it when you left your message, so I could, oh...do some research and have an answer for you, to save BOTH OF US some time?
We bitch about people who can't write clear, concise emails, but most phone messages are worse.
More email, and fewer phone messages. PLEASE!
Guilty, I use pine and miss or ignore delivery notices. Not just if I'm away from my desk, also if I have the (xfce) terminal minimized or I'm working in an alternate tab.
Admittedly, I'm not the typical user; I'd prefer to use telnet than a so-called 'modern client'.
Yes, I just love pop-ups that tell me I can have a larger penis.
Friends at University were getting shouted at for not replying to their email within 4 hours to their job placement adviser.
Just because it is instant doesn't mean your getting an instant reply.
Holy shit. I mean, I can see if you're working tech support or maybe some kind of ... I don't know. What is so important that has to get an immediate email response.
And the most mind boggling thing is how many comments I've seen saying that such a life doesn't seem stressful. What if it was the phone, constantly ringing, and you're either answering it or checking voicemail and using it to call someone back in between answering it before you have to check voicemail again so you can answer the ones you missed when answering it or calling back.
That's not stressful?
At my workplace, my e-mail contains no spam.
Typical emails are automated messages: whenever someone checks in a modified header file, a source file in one of my areas of responsibility, or a source file I monitor because I have a customized version in my workarea that needs to be kept in sync (a system enhancement I like that another programmer won't tolerate being in his area of responsibility); messages tracking the status of bugs and change requests that I've filed or which have been assigned to me; messages reporting to me what files I have locked and what files are in the source tree but not registered with the revision control system.
Non-automated messages include when someone has brought in bagels for a dollar or other free food, when a package for me has arrived, when the code tree is being frozen or unfrozen, when a high-dependency header file is going to be touched at noon or 5PM, when a superior will be gone for a vacation, when a friend is out sick, when customers will be here for a week of software training (and usually what will be served for lunch on Thursday), release schedules, and discussions of bugs.
I run xbiff on my mail ever since a system update removed the regular biff daemon.
I used to keep a presence on the company's IRC channel, but it was generally a waste of my time. I only connect now when there's a serious problem or someone asks me to join.
I find I still have time to run a tail on the ~/.procmail/log of my home e-mail to monitor the effectiveness of the filtering, tuning it as something unwanted gets through.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I do.
First of all I don't want a mail app open all the time, as it eats both memory and screen space (in the icon bar). If Thunderbird could just hide in the system tray, I wouldn't use it either. (And you can laugh about memory use, but after 20 minutes you might notice that your app takes 20 seconds to come in from swap, even with loads of memory in your PC.)
Secondly, I don't like the distraction. Sorry, but when I'm working on something, I'm concentrated. I don't want ANYTHING to pop up telling me there's a new bug for me. I simply don't care. Sometimes after half an hour I will check mail, but often I work for 90 minutes straight and check mail during the next server deploy.
It works nicely, I don't miss anything, and I'm more productive at work.
And when anybody needs my attention RIGHT NOW, they usually just walk to my desk and ask, or call. It's not hard, seriously.
I count "glancing at the status bar" as "checking my email," personally. I use Mutt for my work email, and Yahoo/GMail for the rest. I'm continually glancing over at the title bars for my Yahoo and GMail windows, and at my Mutt display. Just because you don't have to manually click "reload" doesn't mean it doesn't count as "checking."
Oh, and only 40 times an hour? What rank amateurs! I think I must check mine every 15-20 seconds!
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
This compared with, say, the telephone, where 99% of people feel pressured to answer their desk phone, with 1% feeling relaxed enough to go to voicemail.
Dekker Dreyer
"Also, in my experiance if someone who is in the office doesn't reply to your email within a few hours they probably never will."
I hate this kind of attitude where I work. Why should I drop everything I'm doing to type a response to a random e-mail? What happened to picking up a phone when you need an instant answer? Or even, *gasp* walking the 10 feet to come visit me and ask me face-to-face?
I get to e-mail whenever I feel like it (aka after Slashdot). If you need me, come talk to me.
I am still obsessive about checking email so now I have taken to completely shutting down outlook and starting it once every hour.
Filters help and they would work even better if people would use the low importance flag on articles and jokes they forward. Dont get me wrong I appreciate the forwards but the flag would let me know its something I can look at at the eod. I use sylpheed-claws, and make and set headers in the email, it's pretty cool like that. I also use qmail+maildrop, it allows me to filter based on the headers. So people using x-face are probably people who are part of a social ring, so that mail can go elsewhere... gpg'd email can go else where too... It's a pretty cool way of organising things. There's also a simple perl script that I have to announce new mail to me, it just calls "a select" on the inbox.
Why UNIX?
FTA: Just 38 per cent of workers were relaxed enough to wait a day or longer before replying.
In other words, almost half.
Quick, copy this URL and email it to all your co-workers, with your irony level set to full.
I myself have to be a frequent email checker because some of my clients insist on using email even in cases where a phone call would be better (more likely for me to respond immediately when it rings, and more able to understand the nature of the issue without having to trade emails).
Email is a great way to drop a few ideas to someone quickly and in a pseudo form of writing. However, as it has become a disaster of spam, re:re:re:re:re:re: that thing subject lines, incoherent abuses of the language, and more often than not, a whipping boy for laziness (what, you didn't get the memo? I emailed it to you yesterday. There must be something going on with our email).
Worst of all, it really isn't that reliable for many people. I get tons of stuff in my spam box that should be in my inbox (spamassassin), and yet find all kinds of phoney stock tips and pharmaceutical offers in my inbox.
Face it, we raped, pillaged and killed email. Now I just wish we could bury it.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
yeah she causes a lot of stress - no no not like that....
i cannot even see the login box sometimes.
damn! the ****ing browser
Why WASTE MILLIONS marketing linux when web2.0 and http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?7027 allow dummy installation training?
Just the other day I watched this Google TechTalk video http://tinyurl.com/37ykh6, titled "Inbox Zero", and it's well worth the time (59 minutes) imho.
Great tips on how to handle your inbox and become more productive.
Abstract:
"Merlin Mann, a well known productivity guru and creator of the popular 43 folders website will talk about Getting Things Done, the importance of getting your inbox to zero, and strategies for dealing with high volume email"
Also it can be dangerous to pop off a written response in a hurry to any outside party (somewhat dangerous but less so for internal) because haste and not conferring on a response can mean mistakes and mistakes in a written communication can mean liability depending on the communication.
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I'm just calling to see if you got my mail? I mean, I sent it 3 minutes ago but you haven't replied.
Then again, he's the same kind of retard who uses autoreplies. I wonder if he does it with his snail mail when he's on holiday...
At least I can quickly read an email and even print them out and stack them by location if I have to leave the office. What's even better about email is that most who email me can't type well so they are brief and to the point. Voicemail is another animal altogether. They ramble on and on and on and tell me how the technical problem relates to their life story before rapid fire rattling off a phone number I have to play back ten times so I can write it down. The real joy is having five or six of the things to listen to and take notes from. At least I get them forwarded to my email so I don't have to play fiddly fuck with the phone too.
Did they also carry statistics on which workers were able to touch type, and type in what wpm bracket?
People who can touch type are more likely to view e-mail as a natural way to communicate, less alienating and less stressful.
Of course those people who can type twice as fast as another are also going to complain less in comparison about writing e-mail.
You have a phone, don't you? Do you leave it set to permanently divert to voicemail?
It's normal for email to be a primary method of communication in large companies. We don't worry about it. Use it like IM, if you need to.
Although I'd agree that email is a very big stimulus and would encourage a person to feel more anxiety, it seems a bit silly to me to imply that Email is the cause stress in the workplace.
The report may be reflecting the hightened levels of stress most of us now experience in our daily lives compared to even 20 years ago, and email is definitely contributing to this state, but if people are constantly hitting that Send/Receive button, it's because they are feeling under pressure . Not vice versa.
Who polls their email client at work anymore?
People who turned that off because they don't want to hear their computer scratching everytime Nigeria wakes up: "Y-Y-Y-You-Y-Y-Y-You've got-Y-Y-Y-Y". Also people who use email to queue things up so they can focus until a natural stopping point comes along.
but after 20 minutes you might notice that your app takes 20 seconds to come in from swap
Sounds like your os is broken or not configured correctly.