Are you addicted to email?

Last week I shared a story about a trend that I have noticed where many of my coaching clients are really struggling to get their email under control. At first, I thought it was simply a prioritisation and productivity-related issue and then I realised that for some of them it seemed to be more insidious. I suddenly started to wonder if email addiction was a ‘thing’, so I decided to become better informed and do some research to see what I could find.

Well, it’s very interesting and here is what I discovered…YES, email addiction is very real and recognised as a subset of impulsive compulsive disorder. Although there is often a tendency to belittle the seriousness of addictions to technology, these addictions are very harmful as they reduce the quality of our lives.

They are quite responsive to therapies. Admitting to the problem and getting help can be difficult, but life is better free from compulsion. With my quick search, I haven’t found any clinic that specialises in email addiction, although I’m confident that any psychiatrist or clinical psychologist with a specialisation in addiction and impulsive compulsive disorder would be able to help.

The tyranny of email

The concept of email addiction first became popularised with John Freeman's book, The Tyranny of E-mail published in 2009. He examined the astonishing growth of email and how it is changing our lives. He posits that email addiction is the result of our primitive brains not being able to respond to the demands of this new phenomenon. Prior to this, Tom Stafford posted on his blog Mind Hacks in 2006, that he was addicted to email and has such a compulsion to hit the ‘get email’ button that it was disrupting his work and impeding his concentration.

The first email was sent just over 50 years ago and today there are more than 4 billion e-mail users around the globe. It is variously estimated that the average corporate worker receives between 100 and 200 emails per day. If it takes 2 to 5 minutes to process each email, then that equates to around 5 to 12.5 hours of potential email processing per day. According to American management consulting firm McKinsey, the average professional worker spends about one-third of their working week checking emails.

Now, obviously, we can’t spend that much time processing emails, or we would get absolutely no work done. So, we have all developed tactics for managing and processing this deluge. Some people have better self-control than others to these stimuli, and it is easy to understand that some people become addicted to the thrill of receiving yet another email and the need to respond, rather than ignore, file, or delegate the activity suggested by the arrival of the email.

In my opinion, the tyranny of email is very real. As our email boxes continue to grow it is taking a toll on our productivity and invading our free time because we are always ‘on’ and we can access our email so easily from anywhere and on multiple devices.

Why is email addictive?

According to Tom Stafford, co-author of Mind Hacks Why email is a.ddictive (and what to do about it) – Mind Hacks it all comes down to our primitive brains and a phenomenon known to psychologists as ‘operant conditioning’.

Operant conditioning is a method of learning that occurs through rewards and punishments for specific behaviour by creating an association between the behaviour and a consequence (reward or punishment) for that behaviour. The need to perform the behaviour is most effectively reinforced when the reward is random and provided at variable intervals – sounds like a lot of actions that we perform, especially email. Sometimes an email will have great news, an interesting task, or maybe a sale from your favourite online store. Other times, it’s a waste of time, or the allocation of an unpleasant task, or perhaps some negative feedback.

So, email is addictive because it has a variable-interval reinforcement schedule. Our brains are designed to perform behaviours to gain rewards or to avoid punishment. This circuitry has the ability to cause us to perform automatic behaviours even when we consciously don’t wish to perform the behaviour. Checking email has variable internal reinforcement because sometimes it contains a reward, and because you can never tell which time will produce a reward then you can become compulsive about checking it just in case it’s this time!

I particularly like this explanation from Sherese Ezelle, a licensed mental health therapist interviewed for a recent Fast Company article How to break your email addiction (fastcompany.com)

“Addictions are compulsive, meaning the individual needs to complete a task or engage in action in order to feel temporary fulfillment.”

“They can become all-consuming, excessive, and interfere with daily functioning. With email addiction you experience a heightened need to check your email even when engaging in other activities that may be more satisfying but not as immediately gratifying.” Sherese Ezelle

Going back to the two young women I mentioned in the introduction, I believe they are subject to a double-whammy effect. They are constantly checking their email because they have experienced BOTH variable interval rewards and variable interval punishments. Sometimes the email contains praise from a supervisor or positive client feedback, other times it contains a client complaint or a reprimand from a supervisor because they haven’t completed an activity – many times it’s because they haven’t been checking their email. And so, the cycle goes on and the behaviour is reinforced to the point of compulsion.

Signs you might be addicted to email

Here is a list of the warning signs of email addiction, or at least indicators of poor email management practices that will overtime erode your productivity and could impact the quality of your life and your performance at work –

• You disengage and disrupt your in-person interactions with others at work and at home by picking up your phone to check email instead of paying attention in a work meeting or interacting with friends and family
• You attempt to check your emails whilst driving your car, this is not only ineffective, but it also increases your chances of having an accident fourfold.
• You experience increased anxiety when unable to check your email, believing you are missing something critical.
• You are hyper-aware of the location of your phone or laptop in anticipation of checking your email.
• Your life revolves around your inbox, and you behave as if it is your to-do list when indeed it is one action on your to-do list
• You regularly and constantly check your work emails after work and on weekends

Real-world experience – impacts to work performance

I have seen firsthand some compulsive and unproductive behaviours when it comes to emails. One of the most extreme cases was a peer of mine who sat at his desk from 8:30 am to 5 pm spending all this time only responding to his emails. This happened all day and every day. He was so consumed and preoccupied with his emails that he even ate lunch at his desk. This is crazy right?

What made this behaviour even more puzzling is that he would stay back after work hours every night for several hours to work and focus on his actual deliverables and projects. And guess what the result of focusing on his emails and not his workload led to? He didn’t meet his deadlines. He was notorious for constantly and consistently missing his work-related deadlines, and some of these were critical as they were mandated by regulatory bodies. In short, he was jeopardising the ongoing viability of the business.

One day over coffee I asked him why he spent all his critical time responding to his emails. He was shocked by my question as in his mind, emails were the most important activity in his day. He resisted any attempts to support him with various prioritisation and time management techniques such as time boxing and the personal prioritisation matrix. As was expected, he was eventually removed from his role due to performance-related reasons.?

The cost of email addiction

As a productivity expert, the real cost of email addiction is lost productivity.

“The proliferation of portable devices affords you constant exposure to your emails, which, unchecked, allows for an incessant stream of interruptions, decreased productivity, and loss of focus.” Kate Christie, CEO, Time Stylers

When you combine this with the compulsion to stay connected to email 24/7 then we add to this impact in a myriad of ways. Here are a few of the negative impacts of poor email management habits and you can easily imagine exaggerated versions if you are an email addict –

• Distraction causing hours of last productivity each week
• Poor concentration impacting the quality of work product
• Lack of engagement with work colleagues
• Loss of connection with family and friends
• Impacts on leisure time and activities
• Less time for self-care routines such as exercise and healthy meal preparation
• Severe work-life imbalance
• Increased stress and possibility of burnout

How to break email addiction

So, the question is…how is anyone supposed to get meaningful work done and respond to every critical email in addition to composing and sending critical emails? It’s overwhelming and can get out of control…especially when we apply the same logic to Facebook, Instagram, text messages etc. We are being bombarded by new media that set up operant conditioning cycles of action followed by random reward…so, what can be done?

Here is a collection of techniques from the field of addictive compulsive psychology on how to break an addiction, some of them require new features on the technology that we use, whilst others can be relatively easily undertaken yourself –

• A simple delay to the reward that has created the addiction – this would require new features in our email delivery tools to allow for a self-selected delay between going into an email or selecting the Send/Receive function, and the new emails being received – this weakens the strength of the reward connection.
• A limitation of access to email through locking mechanisms in our email tools that only allow email to be reviewed during prescribed periods of the day – this would also reduce the strength of the reward connection
• Other strategies can be used to weaken the stimulus actions such as turning off the email notification message and the sound trigger. In this way, you will not be interrupted every time a new email arrives, and you can determine when and where you review, process, and respond to emails.
• Implement workplace protocols to reduce the use of email for actions such as Cc’ing recipients as a ‘for your information’ when no specific action is required. This would reduce email clutter and reduce the frequency of the action stimulus. This method is called into the category of a social solution.
• Another useful strategy is to remove the problem behaviour by rewarding an alternate, preferred behaviour. This could be implemented by monitoring the time people spend on email and rewarding behaviour that keeps this time below a set benchmark per day or week. One great way to do this would be to have the email system automatically log out users after a few minutes of inactivity – I’m not even sure if this is possible.

Techniques to manage your email

Over the last decade, Harvard, Forbes, and Fast Company have all published several articles on email addiction. Here is a synthesis of the suggested strategies, as well as some from Tom Stafford (mentioned above) and my own tactics that I designed to support myself, and that I now use to support my clients. Luckily, I’m definitely not an email addict, although I have developed some great email management tactics 20 years ago when I was becoming overwhelmed – they have served me incredibly well and now I share them with my coaching clients.

1. Do not respond to emails as soon as they enter your inbox - turn off push notifications and close email down once you have processed emails requiring an urgent response
2. Don’t read or process emails on your phone or mobile device
3. Don’t read, process, or respond to emails outside of reasonable work hours – of course, this can be overridden in extreme cases, although do this carefully
4. Unsubscribe from mailing lists that are cluttering up your Inbox – by law all email generated from mailing lists MUST have an “unsubscribe feature” so use it regularly to avoid Inbox clutter
5. Have a work and a personal email that are separate to ensure you are not being distracted by personal emails during the working day
6. Have an assistant review your emails and file them into folders to make processing more efficient, for example – Urgent Action, Invoices etc
7. Create 2 or 3 time boxes per day to process emails - This is a great way to ensure that you process your emails whilst still returning to chunks of quality time for you to concentrate on major deliverables. Normally two or three half-hour timeboxes per day to review, read and reply to critical emails is more than sufficient
8. Use email time boxes to review emails and take the following quick actions –

Delete – if you don’t need it then dump it!

Delegate to someone else for response and make this CLEAR in the subject line – simply forwarding the email is unlikely to result in action being taken

Quick response – only reply with information that is immediately required or to confirm receipt and that you will undertake the actions or provide a more considered response in a specified timeframe

Longer response – initially send a quick response with when you will provide a larger response, then schedule a time box to do the work required to prepare the response or the required deliverable

File for later – this doesn’t require a response if it is of interest or required for an important but not urgent deliverable that you plan to work on and time box soon. Make sure you have a time box for the deliverable and process the email then.

9. Organise your email into folders in outlook or OneNote based on specific projects or matters. Highlight the urgent ones and set reminder flags in your diary to ensure you respond in the required timeframe.

10.?Use filters to escalate emails from critical contacts for urgent review and response - these can easily be set up in Outlook so that as emails arrive, they are automatically sorted into different folders based on the sender.

11.??Develop email protocols to guide behaviour, especially around the use of email subject lines - each subject line could start with a required action such as – FOR ACTION, URGENT ACTION, FOR NOTING etc

12.??Ban the use of the Cc function – this is my personal favourite and I have explained its power below.

Real-world experience – BAN the Cc function!

20 years ago, when I stepped into my first senior management role with a team of 40 permanent staff and project teams made up of an additional 30 staff members from external vendors, I realised that most of my day was spent processing emails. I was drowning in them and wasting time reading and responding to emails that I didn’t need to or were not of high priority. I was also racking up big hours and I was happy to do a little bit extra each day with the occasional big effort, but it wasn’t sustainable every day.

I got my assistant to monitor my emails for a week and we found that I was getting over 300 new emails per day and 70 per cent of them were CCs from my own team or FYIs.

In my next weekly team meeting, we shared the figures and findings. I immediately banned anyone in my team from sending me emails where I was the cc recipient. I asked why they were choosing to include me on emails as a CC on anonymous emails and it turned out that they mostly wanted to keep me informed of major milestones, critical issues, and roadblocks. Sometimes they were hoping that by Cc’ing me on the email, I would undertake action to assist in removing obstacles to their work.

So, there is no need to send something as an FYI that could easily be covered in a project status report or in regular one-on-one catch-ups.

The new protocol that we established was to never use the CC function, instead, people who needed to take action would be included in the To line of the email with very clear instructions as to the action required. The email could then be forwarded to me as an FYI with a specific message or instructions as to why I would need to have it on my radar.

Find out more…

For a peak at what’s inside, you can book me for a FREE 30 minute coaching call. What are you waiting for, book in NOW

OR, buy The POSITIVE Lawyer Mindset book for some great tools and techniques

My aim is to inspire you to transform your working life and achieve great things and I look forward to joining you on your journey!