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."
Now, WTF was I doing....
I check my e-mail more often than every five minutes and I
What? What was I doing?
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
If you're checking your email hoping for an "invite out" or "juicy gossip," the time you are on probably isn't very valuable before anyway. In a business environment, you aren't wasting time, you're communicating. Not taking in to account organizational spam, of course.
Whale
Slashdot wastes far more time than e-mail :D
People call me telling they are going to send a mail.
I used to check my mail two or 3 times a day, but where I work now it is a 'must' to respond immediately on every mail. Only half the work is done.
I guess the only people actually working is IT to keep the mail server up and running.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
This argument is essentially flawed: It does not take into account the time *saved* by checking the email every five minutes.
If I get an email from my boss he might need an immediate answer, otherwise it is *his* time (more expensive) that is wasted if he needs an answer before he can do something.
And this also applies for my colleagues.
Plus since I don't have to idle while they answer, I make up for that 'wasted' time the article mentions.
Please don't listen to this crap, if you don't want to waste time on email just ignore those powerpoints with music and flowers, but do read the work emails as soon as possible.
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.
TFA and some comments keep mentioning "checking email every 5 minutes".
Don't you use email clients that check for new email automatically every 5 minutes and tells you if a new email has arrived? If you need to manually click a "get new emails" button every 5 minutes then I suggest you find a better program.
In fact I've never seen an email client that couldn't do this, so what gives?
Mr Reynolds has even begun to think of email as rude and invasive, preferring to use tools such as Twitter
Yeah, right! And did you know that heroin was invented because doctors in the 19th century thought morphine was too addictive?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I work in a corporate culture where if you are not available via
instant messaging, many perceive is that you are not really working at
the time. I know several people who wake up in the morning and the
first thing they do is connect via the VPN to get their instant
messaging client running so that their bosses and coworkers think
they are working diligently. I work best by batching tasks via email
messages, so I make it clear to people to just send me an email and I
will get back to them within a day or so. This does not work for some
people; one person in my organization will try instant messaging me
and calling my office phone, but he will not bother to send me an
email, and then he will later complain that he cannot communicate with
me.
As a software engineer, I remain productive by having several hours of
uninterrupted time to focus on a particular task at hand. When the
code builds, installs, tests, and is in the repo ready for the next
release, then I am ready to move on to the next task, like check my
email, which I do maybe two or three times a day. I am able to give my
code the due attention it deserves, and I can concentrate on not
making coding mistakes by keeping the entire code context "swapped in"
my head while I am working on it. During that time, invariably some
project manager somewhere is panicking about a status report or some
other overhead and is trying to get me to update a bug ticket or
something. Usually, by the time I read his frantic email about the
status report, I have already fixed the problem that he wants status
on because I was able to focus on it without interruption.
Most people eventually figure out that they get good consistent work
from me regardless of the fact that they cannot interrupt me freely at
any time, like most other employees in my organization. I do wish that
more of my coworkers would take a more proactive stance on not letting
themselves get interrupted all the time, since I see first-hand the
negative impact it has on their ability to function. I get annoyed
when I am trying to talk to my boss during a meeting and he stammers
right in the middle of an important discussion with, "Uh, wait, I just
got am IM, I, uh, need to, uh, just a second, let me think..."
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
The best/worst part of TFA (and I couldn't really keep myself reading after this pile of crap) is this:
Mr Reynolds has even begun to think of email as rude and invasive, preferring to use tools such as Twitter and Flickr. He also uses social networking sites such as Dopplr, which tracks people's travel, to find out if they are away before he contacts them, and status alerts from instant messenger or Twitter to help him decide if now is a good time to interrupt them. Other tools, such as blogs and wikis, have decreased the amount of email that he sends and receives, while RSS feeds and recommendations from friends and colleagues allow him to keep abreast of the most important news.
How the heck is checking multiple social networking sites, blogs and RSS feeds going to be any less distracting or addictive than having one place to check all your messages? Using multiple sites in such a manner means that every single message you send then becomes a mini adventure in itself, which is a surefire way to lose your train of thought. And since when was sending someone an email 'interrupting' them? Email will only interrupt you if you have a client open and set to alert you, or have been stupid enough to leave email enabled on your phone while doing whatever it is that requires you not to be interrupted.
which is totally what she said
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.........
The study that talks about the 64 second recovery time was published in *2002*. How is this news today??!
Oh, and it included an astounding 16 subjects that worked at one company.
Yeah, that's good data to base generalized conclusions on about all email usage and behavior.
I don't usually respond to ACs, but I can't pass this up...
I am one of those people that insist on communicating via email. Here are my reasons:
1) Workflow and queueing: everything I work on MUST be listed and prioritized in our request database. It is part of my job description. I have been instructed by my direct supervisor to only work on projects that have an official request in the database, period. Any updates to the work being done are also entered into the database as running comments. If a person sends me an email about a project I can enter that information into the database just as it was sent and not have to try to remember every detail of a telephone conversation. This method makes it easier for me to make sure that what the user wants is what they will actually get.
2) Time Savings: I have found that if a user is forced to type out their requests via email or directly into a database of some sort that they will be far more succinct than if they are involved in a conversation. I don't ever remember receiving an email request where the first 4 paragraphs are "how's it going?" or "this is what has been going on in my life recently" or "did you hear about the new person in Accounting? I heard they came here from blah blah blah."
3) Historical record: again, trying to remember details of telephone conversations over the span of a project, even if decent notes are taken, will almost certainly lead to something getting missed. I have had the experience several times in my career of having a user insist that they told me a certain tidbit of information when in fact they had not. I have also had the experience where the user actually DID tell me something and I just plain forgot. Having a reference record in the form of saved emails makes this much less likely to occur. There is also the "Cover Your Backside" benefit. Like it or not, at some time in your career you WILL have to defend something you did or did not do, and having the email trail to back you up helps tremendously.
So, you can call me a grumpy old codger, or whatever the current vernacular requires, but I will continue to insist that business communications occur via email. Now you kids get off my lawn!
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."