Cut ties to your inbox by actually speaking with colleagues, experts say
Toronto Star, Monday, Sep 29, 2008, pg L2
Hillary Rhodes
The Associated Press
Remember when "You've got mail" alerts were thrilling?
The emails that now pour into queues and spill onto BlackBerry devices have left some workers feeling so bogged down they can find little time to do anything else.
"We're like frazzled lab rats, being poked and prodded and beeped and pinged," says Maggie Jackson, author of “Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.”
The average worker receives 200 emails a day, according to the business and technology research firm Basex.
It's an unfortunate irony that a system once lauded for its promises of efficiency has filled days at the office with wasted, fragmented time.
Constant access to information, communication and technology has becomes such a big issue, experts say, that its implications go beyond a lack of productivity and focus at work and into the quality of work relationships, as well as those at home. "Attention is the bedrock to learning, memory, social connection and happiness," Jackson says.
"When you're overusing it for the petty things – like the guy in the next cubicle – stand up and ask him the question," says Cherie Kerr, author of The Bliss or `Diss' Connection: E-mail Etiquette for the Business Professional.
Checking email can also be an all-too-tempting alternative to actual work.
And like any form of procrastination, sometimes taking care of email just feels so good.
"Email is being used like a drug to get a hit of accomplishment when one feels he is spinning his wheels," says technology analyst Craig Roth in his blog, KnowledgeForward.
In July, the Information Overload Research Group, a non-profit with members from technology companies and other industry experts, was launched with the mission to raise awareness of how current communication tools can impede productivity.
And the industry that created this problem is also trying to capitalize by helping people organize their inboxes. A program called C-MAIL promises to help prioritize email by learning through the user's clicks about what's more or less important.
The makers of Xobni, which is "inbox" spelled backwards, say their Microsoft Outlook plug-in speeds up the process by "threading" conversations (grouping responses together).
Right now, I have 874 messages in my email. It sounds crazy, but it's hard to delete messages when you might need them one day. I keep telling myself that one of these days I will go through all the messages and delete the outdated ones. It's hard enough to keep up with new mail than to go back to old stuff.
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