The Blessing and the Curse of Email

Email has transformed the way professionals (and beyond) both work and live. Its versatility, portability, ease-of-use and speed have made it the preferred way in which we digitally send and receive messages.

That's part of the good news.

Unfortunately, email has also unfortunate sides to it, including spam, viruses, quantity, poor quality content, and much more. The one controversial drawback of email I will be focusing on here does not come from the outside, but from the inside. It's our propensity to check and process email frequently. In my view: so frequently that our ability to get things done during the day is severely diminished.

Before you challenge my assertion, let's first start with the facts. I recently created a poll on LinkedIn.com where I asked:

How many times a day do you check your email?

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Depending on when you're reading this post, you can add your vote or see the final results at:

http://SergiuSimmel.com/Poll/CheckEmail

At the time of this writing (the poll is not closed yet) I got 250 votes, and here are the results, as reported by LinkedIn.com:

To sum it up:

• 16% of the self-selected respondents check their email 5 or fewer times a day,
• 84% check their email more than 8 times a day or so, with more than 57% doing so constantly.

So what, you may say? Technology has made it easy for us to do so, so why not? Outlook pops up a little screen whenever a new message arrives, so why not check it out? Blackberries and Androids and iPhones either chime or vibrate on the same; they are with us everywhere, so why not reach for them to see what's going on?

This is all great, and at times even highly useful. But let's all take a few steps back, and ask ourselves this very fundamental question: What is really our "job" in our profession? (Never mind life in general). What are we here to do when we work? What does our employer (may be ourselves) want us to accomplish?

While we're pondering over this question, let's consider a possible answer: Our job is to be  "Professional Email Responders." Is that it?

For most (not all, but most) people, this is NOT the right answer. So processing our email inbox is a means to an end, not the end.

Now, don't get me wrong: there are jobs out there that require exactly that. Think support. Think help desk. Think assistants. Most jobs however don't dominantly require instantaneous email response. Yet we feel compelled to do exactly that … simply because we can. The question is: at what cost?

Every time we shift our focus away from our task-at-hand to checking (and processing) our email, and then shift it back to our task, we pay a substantial price. Why? Because it takes time to "recover" from this switch in focus. In fact, research done by Basex Research Corp and even Microsoft has shown that such interruptions cost us a significant portion of our work day.

In "Information Overload: We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us,"  Basex analysts Jonathan B. Spira and David M. Goldes (December 2007) show that interruptions from phone calls, e-mails and instant messages consume 28 percent of a knowledge worker's work day.

If you'd like to experience yourself how interruptions affect you, just visit http://ProductivityForLife.com/P4P and go through the first 10 minutes of the program, where you'll be asked to participate in a 4-minute exercise. You may be shocked by the results!

Bottom line: 84% of my poll responders trade their being "on top of their emails" all the time against wasting 28% of their time due to these switches, meaning huge personal productivity losses. Is this a reasonable trade-off?

I doubt it.

How can we correct this situation?

The answer is both simple and (for most "email addicts") difficult: dramatically reduce the number of times we process email during the day, and thus eliminate many of these unnecessary switches. I recommend limiting it to 3-5 times a day, like 16% of my LinkedIn poll respondents already do.

Here are three techniques I have implemented in my own practice:

1. Schedule specific times on my daily calendar when I check and process my email. Use the "recurring appointment" facility most electronic calendars (such as Outlook and Google Calendar) have to schedule these "email processing" times once, and have them appear on your calendar every day.
2. Remove "new email" notifications (such as Outlook's pop-up notification or your smart phone chimes), so you don't get tempted to immediately stop what you were doing and check your email.
3. Use (for a limited amount of time) your email service provider's auto-responder to inform your correspondents that, for productivity, you only check your email 3 times a day. That sets up everybody's expectations right. It turns out that speed of response is much less important than predictability.

(More techniques and details at http://ProductivityForLife.com/Workshop)

I urge you to carefully consider this trade-off between your own productivity and your "email response speed," and decide whether 28% of your time (which amounts to TWO MONTHS a year wasted through switch tasking) is worth your being "on top of your emails" every moment of your work day.