Email – Curing Our Out-of-Control Addiction

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror has an excellent post in which he compares the human response to email to the response of rats with variably-ratio schedules of reinforcement. In other words, (some) humans like the response they get each time they retrieve their email.  Press the shiny Send/Receive button in Outlook and receive a nice envelope icon in your system tray as a reward!

We’re so ecstatic to get that single useful email out of hundreds that we can’t keep ourselves from compulsively pressing the new email lever over and over and over, hoping it will happen again soon, like the caged rats in Skinners’ experiments.
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We’ve overloaded email with so many meanings that it has imploded as a communication medium. Need an urgent answer to your question within a few minutes? Fire off a quick email and demand a response! Want to have a long back and forth discussion with several people? Email everyone! Do you have a new theory that you desperately want to explain to someone? Send it to them via email! Got a funny joke or picture you’re dying to share? Email it to the office alias!

I have to admit that I am guilty of some of these transgressions, and I am known to complain vociferously to myself about some of my colleagues doing the same thing.  Lately, I have found myself emailing folks about question x and including my group’s email alias.  I think this problem is further complicated by the proliferation of BlackBerry devices.  Couple that with the occasional difficulty one has in speaking with some over-booked individuals face-to-face, and the problem becomes much worse.  It is very easy for one to go down the “rabbit hole” of email.

When we treat email as the kitchen sink of communication, appropriate for everything, it simply ceases to work at all.

Stop. Sending. Email.

Instead of abusing email as a “one size fits all” conduit for communication, be smart. Know when to escalate your communication to the right medium for the particular message you’re trying to deliver:

I have to admit, that even I have become guilty of some of the transgressions Many of the recommendations Jeff makes are the same ones I follow daily, along with some additional ones I try to follow.

• Disable mail notifications.

• That shiny envelope icon in your system tray, turn it off!
• That nice message preview you get when you receive email, turn it off!

• • If possible, open your trusty Outlook client at scheduled times of the day.
  • If you must have your email client open all the time, use a multiple desktop utility to make it easy to work as distraction-free as you can.

• • Highlight those important emails from those associates and colleagues you value.

• • Your BlackBerry does not need to ring, ping, or vibrate with every email.  Create a rule such that emails from certain people or of a specific priority are accompanied with an appropriate sound to alert you to its importance.  (This is a problem, though, with Exchange 2007 and how it treats Meeting Cancellation notices as high-priority messages).
  • If someone needs your urgent assistance, Alexander Graham Bell invented this wonderful device called the telephone.

• • Let others know that you are not a slave to the envelope icon.  If its urgent, they can pick up the phone or come see you in the office.  (Personally, this is a problem in cube-land with the dreaded “pop-in.”)

So, let’s all try and do our part.  If you need something from someone, resist the urge to fire off that email.  If you are waiting on something, resist the urge to press the Send/Receive button.  Email does not have to be the time-sink it has become in the workplace.