It is always nice to encounter scientific backing for advice you have been dispensing to your friends for years, whether or not they ever actually asked for it — so I was pleased to learn of a new study lending support to the notion that if you check email less frequently, you will be less stressed. As Jesse Singal explains at Science of Us, researchers at the University of British Columbia instructed two groups of people to treat their email in radically different ways. One was told to keep their email programme closed, with notifications off, checking messages only three times a day. The other did what too many of us do instead: Kept their notifications switched on and checked email ceaselessly through the day.
The occasional checkers felt less stressed — while the frequent checkers did not even have the compensation of feeling any more productive. This may seem obvious: Do a stressful thing less frequently and you will be less stressed. (“Doctor, it hurts when I do that!” “Well don’t do that, then.”) But as the study’s co-author Kostatin Kushlev points out, it is a bit more intriguing than that: Resisting temptations, like checking email, is itself generally an unpleasant and effortful experience. So why did engaging in that activity make people feel better than just checking messages when they came in? One likely answer is that it reduced the high cognitive costs of task-switching: Jumping between different kinds of tasks consumes energy and time, so “batching” is just a more efficient use of your limited capacities.
Another is that feelings of autonomy make us happier. When you check email at fixed times, you are taking control of when it enters your mental world; check it whenever a new message comes in, and essentially email is controlling you. The “check it occasionally” approach to email, then, has always been a good idea (provided your job lets you get away with it). But it is also an approach that is especially well-suited to how email is changing. More and more, our inboxes are not inboxes at all. That metaphor, borrowed from physical in-trays, implies an assumption that everything that enters will be seen, thought about, then replied to as appropriate. But as email volumes continue to spiral upwards, our inboxes are turning into streams akin to Facebook’s newsfeed. Nobody really expects you to see every item in a stream — and the only way to deal with one sanely is to dip in for a while, deal with whatever looks important, urgent or entertaining and then to step away and let the stream flow on.
As an advocate — and still, mostly, a practitioner — of Inbox Zero, this pains me. I am resigned to treating other sources of incoming data as streams. If my backlog of unread magazines gets too big, I happily throw them out. If you reply to me on Twitter, but your message scrolls out of sight before I see it, it is probably gone for good — and I am afraid I do not have the bandwidth to feel bad about that. But I cling to the notion that email’s different: That is it is governed, rightly, by a default assumption that every message sent to me, or by me, deserves a reply. In practice, of course, there are countless emails I don’t reply to: Thousands of spam messages I never even see; hundreds of impersonal advertisements and PR email-blasts I ignore; plus, I confess, a handful of personal messages that just seem too arduous to engage with.
And algorithms are easing the process of ignoring emails: Gmail has been nudging us to focus on certain emails while ignoring others since it launched Priority Inbox; its new product, Gmail Inbox, promises to comb messages to extract important meetings and tasks. Presumably, the endpoint is that email comes to resemble Facebook, where there is never a guarantee that you will see something a friend posts, if the algorithm does not think you should. (And who influences the algorithm? Couldn’t Starbucks just pay Google to prioritise those messages in which friends suggest we meet for coffee there?)
Still, the social norm persists: If you email me as an individual, I aim to reply; if I email you — and you are not a celebrity, or someone else I would expect to be abnormally overwhelmed by messages — I will be awaiting your response. But what will happen as volume makes that unfeasible for ever more people? Eventually, I suppose, the system will self-correct; we will send fewer and fewer personal emails and use alternative platforms for specific purposes — Facebook for birthday greetings, texts to arrange meetings, Twitter instead of office water-cooler chat. Some of which will then themselves get as overwhelmed as our inboxes, or alternatively ignored. Whereupon we will need yet another solution, which I cannot yet perceive, though I have a nauseating feeling that it will somehow involve that terrible guy from Uber getting even richer.
Until there is a consensus on which platform to use for what, though — and on when a lack of response is or is not acceptable — you can be sure that ignored emails will be the cause of plenty of misunderstandings and bad feelings. Not least because people in lower-status roles will feel a continued pressure to reply to everything (and rapidly) long after those in higher-status roles have stopped trying.
The bigger point here is not really about email in particular; it is about the ever greater “boundarylessness” of work. When anyone can be contacted at any time of the day, in any location; when the costs in time and effort of sending a message to a colleague, client or underling dwindle to nothing; when we are confronted by an effectively infinite amount of information we could consume, or tasks we could perform, if only time were infinite too ...
In such an environment, arbitrary limits, like checking email three times a day, will increasingly be the only way to cope. You would never try to buy all the food at the supermarket or watch all the shows on Netflix; the time when the same goes for email may not be far off.
Meanwhile, turn off email notifications and close your inbox. You will thank me — though please do not feel you need to send an email to say so.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
