Email Best Practices 2.0

This month I published an article, Managing Email and the ‘Get Organized’ Myth, in The Practical Lawyer, an American Law Institute-American Bar Association periodical (let me know if you’d like me to email a copy to you).

Drawing on research papers on email overload and email stress, one of my subthemes was “Yes, email is hard”, and I explained why. What I found interesting was that several people who reviewed drafts of the paper said they felt better knowing that not being able to keep up with their email was not their fault.

This piece is along the same line. Perhaps it will make us feel better knowing why we check our Inboxes so often (or at least one theory of why) … even if we continue to do it.

What compels us to constantly check for new email?

Tom Stafford, a lecturer at the University of Sheffield, explains that checking for email is not unlike pulling the lever of a slot machine:

“Both slot machines and email follow something called a ‘variable interval reinforcement schedule’ which has been established as the way to train in the strongest habits. This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there’s something wonderful – an invite out, or maybe some juicy gossip – and I get a reward.”

Of course we have to check our email …

The question is how often?

The currently promoted practice is to turn off all alerts and notifications and just check our inboxes a few times per day. Yet in a recent study on workplace email stress it was found that people who get a lot of email actually experience less email stress if they check for new email continuously throughout the day.

It’s perfectly reasonable to want to know when important, urgent email arrives. But here’s the rub. For most of us, all email arrives into our Inboxes without distinction, all seemingly important and urgent until we look at it. As a result, we find ourselves clinging to the tops of our Inboxes, scanning over the same inbox emails repeatedly in fear of missing something we need to act on.

What are we to do?

For some people, checking at specific times during the day works well for them. If that’s you, then great.

If you need to check more often, or even very, very often, at least be sure to find a way to check only your important email. We show clients how to bring their important emails forward so when they do check they are at least not distracted by unimportant emails. We also encourage them (gently) to check less often, or at least be more conscious about when and why they check. As satisfying as it may be, doing it simply out of habit can be a real time waster.

Sources and further reading

I first read of this research in John Freeman’s book The Tyranny of E-mail. John shows email’s darker side in an entertaining way. I later read an interesting article Breaking the Email Compulsion by Suw Charman-Anderson.