Information Week: Email is making you stupid

May 23 2010

Information Week dives into the topic of why email is giving us all organizational ADD, and what you can do about it...

Researchers at the University of Michigan found that productivity dropped as much as 40 percent when subjects tried to do two or more things at once. The switching exacts other costs too--mistakes and burnout. One of the study's authors, David Meyer, asserts bluntly that quality work and multitasking are incompatible.

Brian Bailey and Joseph Konstan of the University of Minnesota discovered that sleeve-tugging peripheral tasks triggered twice the number of errors and jacked up levels of annoyance to anywhere between 31 percent and 106 percent. Their interrupted test workers also took 3 percent to 27 percent more time to complete the reading, counting or math problems. In fact, the harder the interrupted task, the harder it was to get back on track.
The article concludes with several suggestions of how to make email more effective.  In addition to their list, I would add the most obvious one -- use more collaborative, information sharing tools that help colleagues and customers change from reactive to proactive in their interactions and information sharing.

Link: Information Week: Email is making you stupid > (Thanks, Rob)

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Messaging  Add/View Comments [10]

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  1. 1  Philip Storry http://www.not-so-rapid.com | 5/24/2010 4:10:24 AM

    Email is making me stupid?

    I've just checked, and given how many emails I get and how stupid I am, I don't think that it's fair to blame JUST email.

    I suspect that pointless meetings and PowerPoint make up the shortfall...

  1. 2  Roger Hintz http://www.rogerhintz.com | 5/24/2010 7:52:35 AM

    Email is making us stupid? If email-based interruptions are distracting, then what about Instant Messaging? I get more inconvenient IM pop-ups than emails. Oh, and I agree with Philip @1 about pointless meetings and PowerPoint.

  1. 3  bill Geimer  | 5/24/2010 9:40:55 AM

    I wonder that they found when looking at the gender bias - if women deal better than men. The article didn't say. I wonder how many e-mails it takes to get the asylum. Or if I am there now.

  1. 4  Matthias Wille http://www.flexdomino.net | 5/24/2010 2:25:15 PM

    The problem is indeed not email as such nor the amount of email, but rather the way we consume it. I just feel to add a few points:

    - disable all your IM type clients whenever you have to focus on a task.

    - remove sound and vibrating notifications on your smart devices.

    - try to follow up on your mail in sufficiently distant intervals (even risking leaving an 'urgent' one in the queue)

    I have only 2 notifications enabled: phone calls and calendar notifications on my mobile. Everything else is permanently silenced or silenced whilst I have to focus.

    How collaborative solutions help at this point (acknowledgement of received notification) is though not clear to me. I thought that would be one step later, when one is sharing or delegating the at this stage still personal information.

  1. 5  Andrew Magerman http://www.magerman.com | 5/25/2010 3:55:13 AM

    Ed,

    I am not sure where collaborative solutions would help at all - it might replace e-mail, certainly, but it would not solve the problem of getting distracted. Checking my email is a wonderful way to procrastinate, in my opinion the latest standard Mail Client is even more of a source of distraction, with the plug-ins and instant messaging.

    For periods of protracted work I need to shut all these things off!

  1. 6  Mike VandeVelde http://www.cascadiacodeworks.ca/ | 5/25/2010 10:50:46 AM

    "You have just increased my annoyance level by no less than 31%, possibly up to 106%. Here go read this study."

    Next time someone attempts to communicate with me, I will have to try that out!

  1. 7  Michael Robinson http://www.invcs.com | 5/25/2010 12:29:04 PM

    Well I thought we'd get to have the George Jetson problem of the "3 hour/3 day work week" being a killer. All this tech and we're not even close :)

  1. 8  David (The Notes Guy in Seattle)  | 5/25/2010 12:47:24 PM

    And this is exactly why, when I spent a month kayaking the Grand Canyon that I felt more content than I have at any other time in my working life. There was NO connection to the outside world. It took a full week of living in the silence before my mind fully relaxed.

    I work on a local replica of my mail file and have replication run only every 30 minutes, so I get 15 emails every half hour instead of 1 email every 2 minutes.

  1. 9  David Bell  | 5/25/2010 11:50:37 PM

    @8 - "so I get 15 emails every half hour instead of 1 email every 2 minutes."

    Yes, I wonder how much "Inbox monitoring" is the disruptive factor for those folks who just have to sit and watch for the next email coming in.

    By the way, I am near Seattle too.