Email is good.

Gloria on a recent podcast:

we find people check email on average 77 times a day, which is quite a lot. And we know that email creates stress. We know this from studies.

I did one study some time ago where we cut off email in an organization for some people for a five-day workweek. And without email, people were less stressed. And we measured this empirically with heart rate monitors. We found that their stress went down.

We also found that people became more social. They actually walked around and visited people in their offices. And people reported enjoying this experience a lot more. So we know that email causes stress. It’s not just correlation, but there’s causality there.

Emphasis mine there at the end. No wonder some people have such a distasate for email: it is a direct and provable source of stress.

They talk about email a lot in the podcast, and there is a bunch of nuance there, so I recommend it, it’s a good one. For example, it’s not just email itself, it’s the nature of it. If checking your email just showered you in good news all the time, well, clearly that would be a different outcome.

I imagine you can guess: I think email can be managed such a way that it isn’t a source of stress and is closer to a good-news-machine.