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 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.
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.
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
I find those kinds of notifications just as distracting as the phone ringing. Yes, I can ignore either, but I'd rather finish what I'm doing and check my emails at a convenient point.
Personally, I find email the best form of communication by far for work related issues. I can point people back to what I said earlier when they can't remember it, I don't get interrupted as readily, and I can refer back to what others have said and remind them of it later.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
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.
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.
Most of the "sky is falling" articles come from the UK especially global warming. I immediately discount any news article from UK.
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.
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 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?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
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.
If you have Outlook, turn off the toaster prompt and have the new email icon show up in the taskbar. Out of the way and doesn't distract.
I avoid IM at work whenever possible for this very reason: I have enough to concentrate on without seeing stupid pop-ups every 2 minutes. I tried to do some testing and my project manager was IMing me every 2 minutes asking if I was done yet and how it was going. How the hell are you supposed to do a proper test with that kind of interruption? Now I'm only on MSN when we're doing late night work and the server support guys aren't logged into their email.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
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"