Email: Running Constantly Without Going Anywhere.
Andrew (AJ) Kehl, MS, CFO, CM, MIFireE
Speaker, Author, and Lifelong Learner || Fire Chief at Misawa AB, Japan || I help military and civilian managers reach their peak through robust leadership development opportunities, coaching, and public speaking.
People check their instant messenger, to include email, once every six minutes.?
More than 3 hours a day sending emails out.?
The social circuits in our brain aren’t meant for the constant overload for attention.
If this is the case, how in the world can we be expected to concentrate on something long enough to provide an outcome of high quality???
In my humble opinion, communication overload (dominated by email) is one of the most problematic issues we face today. Have you noticed the amount of emails sent and received trending up over the years? I know I have.?
In a 2016 study, workers were tracked all day and found that employees checked email over 75 times a day.??The trend is still going up. In 2005, average business user would send 50 emails a day. That number is now over 126!
A 2018 report from Rescue Time noted the most common average checking time of communication applications was once every minute with the longest uninterrupted interval of a paltry 40 minutes.
Let this one sink in:??
The average worker gets about an hour and fifteen minutes of uninterrupted work time?
Burn out happens quickly with communication overload. New tech only makes less friction and more interruptions. A great example of this is the integration of applications like Slack into an organizations workflow. With it, communication has less friction, therefore, messages can be shot off at an insane rate.?
Cal Newport argues in his book, “A World Without Email “ that communication overload – the feeling that you could never keep up with all the different incoming request for your time and attention – conflicts with our ancient social wiring, leading to unhappiness in the short term and burn out in the long term.
Insert the ‘two hands up emoji’.?
My massive heartburn with email has caused me to spend considerable time studying ways to which I can swim against the current. It begins with a simple question:?
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How much irrelevant information does one process each day through email??
I’d argue—A LOT.?
There is a performative dimension to writing emails too. The, ‘look at all the work I’m doing’ move you see often in bureaucracies.
People confuse answering emails with real work. Then, the fact that conversations through email are mostly fragmented, forces us to check throughout the day, causing the Cal Newport coined term, “Cycle of Responsiveness”. Born with the smartphone and ability to reply quickly with little friction, thus inadvertently rising expectations of the sender.?
But here lies the next question:
Are you “slacking off” if you don’t respond to an email immediately??
The bombardment of messages are dictating how we spend our time. It should be the other way around. In a recent newsletter, I lay out one way of curbing this—by laying out email expectations.?
Although I good start, an email auto-reply will not lead you out of the productivity quicksand that many organizations are stuck in. Instead, efforts need to be around developing better workflows for your attention capital.?
My next newsletter will lay out actionable ways to create a workflow that eliminates up to 80% of those annoying emails that flood your life each day.
We can’t tread these waters forever. Without better workflows, its the email abyss for us.?
Your friend,?
AJ
I help businesses avoid costly mistakes and save time when hiring employees or implementing new procedures, new software or equipment. I’m "the training guy".
2 年I started noticing this trend back on active duty. As a time-management discipline, I check work emails in the morning, at lunch and prior to signing off. My team, my boss and my customers are aware. If it's urgent, call, text or dm. My personal emails I check in the morning and evening.
Munitions Systems Manager @ United States Air Force | Logistics and Supply Chain Management | Curriculum & Instructional Design
2 年So much of my time is wasted on emails. One of the most significant issues you mention in your article is that people check it every 6 minutes. I try to prioritize my emails based on their relevance. Often, taskers are sent out and may have a lower priority for you but are at the top of the list for others. Reading and responding to these emails take away from the time I could focus on more important things. Communication burnout is real.