Article from Dan Mercer that’s an obvious must-link from this blog. His opener sets the stage:
In her book Attention Span, UC Irvine informatics professor Gloria Mark describes a study in which her team shut off email for a group of office workers for a week, then compared their behavior to the previous three weeks. The participants experienced notable benefits, including lower stress (as measured by heart rate) and reduced task switching. They also reported a sense of freedom and a healthier pace to their work.
But the big idea is that it only worked because they all did it. If just one of them did it, they’d be left out/behind instead of getting the benefits.
It them quotes/jumps to a major conclusion:
Email is a much bigger problem that needs to be tackled at the organizational and even societal level.
I need to read the book and understand more, because there are just glaring obvious limits to this. If you took these office workers and sealed them into isolated caves where they cannot communicate with anyone about anything, do you think they would still “have a healthier pace to their work”? If healthier is “doing nothing” then sure. Or if their job is staring at the wall or collecting pebbles.
My point is that people need to communicate to work on a team. Maybe email isn’t right for that, or an unnecessary add-on or something. That’s worth exploring. But if you take away the email, it seems like they just need to communicate in other ways. So what are those ways? And are those ways the ways that seems inherently healthier? Why? Is a red “unread” badge on Slack massively different than a read “unread” badge in an email client?
Just to throw some anecdotal evidence on the pile as I’m wont to do, here’s what’s in my inbox right now. I’m always on-top of my email and keep it clear, so this is a small fraction of various things I’m communicating about.
- A dude I’ve never heard before is showing me some stuff he’s working on and it’s actually pretty interesting and I’m considering asking him if he wants to be a podcast guest.
- The CEO of a company sent me an email about an upcoming launch they have and I want to send him a pitch back about some advertising ideas I think I could help with. Some chance it’s a real win win.
- I’ve been invited to speak at a conference in the fall, and I’ve already met a really interesting co-speaker who I hadn’t met before this, and we’re coordinating time to talk and plan things. They have a cool fancy job and it feels like they are a good person to know.
- A welcome email from some bit of software I’m using for the first time. It so happens it related to email design. I just had a quick play with it and while I’m probably not going to be some long-term user of it, it’s already provided a bit of inspiration I can use.
Why would I throw that out? Email is not causing me pain and misery, it’s friggin’ invaluable to my professional life.
My suspicion, as ever, is that a worker-bee at Big Tech Company has an inbox just overflowing with messages with a super low signal to noise ratio, and that’s the problem. The job is to not get a heaping pile of useless emails, not to blame email as an overall bad communication mechanism.
You can also take steps as an individual to be intentional about how you personally use the tool. Interestingly, Dr. Mark’s research into email use found that batching your email-checking wasn’t really correlated with lower stress (in fact, for some people, it causes higher stress!), but the total amount of time spent on email was correlated with stress. So find ways to use it less – specifically ways to need to use it less, not just trying to use it faster. Unsubscribing from emails, setting up some filter rules, or simply excusing yourself from conversations can pay dividends over time; I try to diligently unsubscribe from unhelpful email, and as a result, my inbox isn’t very distracting.
See I feel like Dan actually gets it.
