Breaking the e-mail compulsion

Todays Technology section of the Guardian has an article describing research that quantifies the negative impact of e-mail on our working life.

Researchers have found that:

• People respond incredibly quickly to e-mail alerts: Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University  found that 70% of alerts got a reaction within six seconds. That's faster than picking the phone up after three rings.  (Jackson wrote up his research in this pdf)

• The interruptions caused by e-mail take significant time to recover form:  Jackson found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email.

• People check their e-mail more often than they think:  In a survey of office workers the majoriy told Karen Renaud that they checked their e-mail once an hour.  When she monitored their PCs she found that most of them checked it every five minutes.

• Checking e-mail is compulsive: Tom Stafford of the University of Sheffield believes that the compulsion to check e-mail has the same root cause as the compulsion to play slot machines.  The best way to ingrain a really strong habit into someone is to reward them for it occasionally and unpredictably.  The slot machine player often gets nothing, but sometimes hits the jackpot.  The e-mail checker often gets nothing interesting but sometimes gets rewarded with an invitation, some news or gossip, or some humour.

I attended a useful training course on e-mail management by my colleague Ian Wooler.  Four of the nuggets I picked up from it were:

• Don't send an e-mail to a colleague that you can see: This is a rule I have stuck to and has benefited me (it takes longer to compose an e-mail than to go and chat to them, and because you can see them you can pick a moment when they are not busy).

• Turn your automatic e-mail alerts off: this breaks the pavlovian reaction between being told you have an e-mail and going in and checking it.

• Identify set times in the day when you will check your e-mail:  I try to check mine at 10am, 2pm and 4pm.  I am more productive when if I don't start the day by checking e-mail.

• Don't put your out-of-office alert on if you are only out of the office for one day: Out of office alerts increase my vulnerability to spam (by advertising that the e-mail account is live) and is unhelpful to most or all of the people that are likely to be e-mailing me on any particular day

From a records management point of view the biggest problem with e-mail is that an important communication sits only in the in-box of the recipient and the sent items of the sender.  This means that:

• It is not accessible to others, even to close colleagues

• it is not related to the other information, documents and correspondence about the same piece of work.

The challenge that I would like organisations and vendors to address is this:

• How do we enable colleagues to generate, send and store an important communication about a project within the same application that holds the rest of the documents, communications and information relating to that project?

The closest I have seen to this situation is in SharePoint team sites, where a team site can have an e-mail account, and where mail can be sent from the team site, or to the team site.  Anyone with access permissions to the team site can view all the e-mails sent from or to the site.

I would like my e-mail to be nothing more or less than an alerting mechanism. I want my e-mail to alert me when a colleague has posted a question about a particular project in our team site, when my sister posts a message for me on Facebook or Last FM, when someone in America posts a comment in response to one of my blogposts.

The alerts enable me to go off to the appropriate application, make whatever responses I choose, and all the content stays in the appropriate application, in context, and accessible as  appropriate to other colleagues/friends/readers.

James Lappin

Comments

[Samuel]

What a great post! I blogged on it and pointed to some information (product development) answering your question. 'Context' and keeping information 'in context'. Jep, that's what it's all about and that's what email is not good at.