Slashdot Mirror
Why Email Has Become Dangerous
mikkl666 writes "The Sydney Morning Herald runs an interesting story dealing with a study about email user behavior, explaining how and why email can be a terrible distraction: 'It takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email. So people who check their email every five minutes waste 8 1/2 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.' Email is also compared to slot machines in the way it works psychologically: 'So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful — an invite out or maybe some juicy gossip — and I get a reward.' There are also some hints offered on how to keep control of the inbox, for those of us already addicted."
The ideal is not to do that, because you will stop doing what you were doing and start doing something else.
The best is to have fixed times during the day as to where you launch your email client and answer all the mails in there and then CLOSE your client again.
I used to do it two or three times a day. Morning, to get starting, right after luch and an hour before leaving to see if anything MUST be done immediately. Most of the time it could wait till the next morning. Sometimes it was 1 mail and exceptionally 2 mails that needed action or a reply.
And more often then not, not responding to an email would solve the problem by itself.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
This says more about those people than it does about email. If they can't keep focussed on a subject without their mind wandering off because of incoming mail, then they need other remedies. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you must. Honestly people complain about all the demands on their time, and then deliberately put themselves in situations that increase those demands. Sounds to me like they are engineering an excuse to do less work.
Nice thing with email, it is asynchronous, you can leave a conversation hanging if you have to do something else which is more difficult to do conversing in person or on the phone.
While I know that supposedly only old people in korea use email, I find it one of my best tools for conversing with people, often multiple ones at the same time. And since nowhere I've ever worked allowed IMs due to security reasons, I've never really used them. But, pretty much everywhere has email...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
This is bean-counter doomsdayer mentality. These are the same bozo's that try to quantify how much time you spend tuning your radio to a station or watching TV and the like. You can't get that time back. People simply aren't going to sit at a desk and use every second of their work day doing robotic activity, get over it. Humankind has already decided that the benefits of email are viable regardless. People like this either need a life or a place to go that's really quiet so they can count grains of sand in a jar.
For those of us with ADD, that 8.5 hour figure isn't accurate. For the ADD mind, email can mean one of two things. It's either:
1) business as usual (we're still getting things done and may even be more productive when our minds get these wonderful little rabbit trails), or
2) we get absolutely nothing important done (so that 8.5 hour figure would actually refer to weekly productive time.
Then again, for a minority of the ADD crowd (myself included), Slashdot takes the place of email in serving as that uber-stimulus that actually helps keep me running at peak efficiency.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Actually, I spend less time checking for mail if I have alerts turned off. The alerts are a distraction more than anything else, every time I get one it triggers me to go look at my inbox.
The key is SMART alerts. Only have it pop up an alert if something that needs immediate attention pops up. I've done this in the past, and it lets me work for hours on end without being distracted by non-priority emails.