Zombie Email Health Scare

Picture credit: Kell Bailey

The latest email issue to hit the headlines comes in the form of a health scare. The University of California, Irvine recently released a study on a work without emails which put in its simplest terms highlights the fact that people who frequently check their emails suffer higher levels of stress than those who don’t.

And as Chuck Klosterman of the New York Times wrote, there is also an excellent analogy between emails and zombies, saying that

“Every zombie war is a war of attrition. It’s always a numbers game. And it’s more repetitive than complex. In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work e-mails on a Monday morning”.

The trouble is that not only does it feel like you are fighting a zombie horde when clearing through your inbox, it also feels like you have become a zombie as your productive life ebbs’ away whilst you spend more and more of your time checking emails. With this communication overload it is far too easy to feel overwhelmed, become increasingly stressed and falling ill from the pressures of modern day life.

We live in a world where you are expected to be always contactable and that when someone does contact you, then they will inevitably expect an almost instantaneous response. When people are drawn to work from their inbox, checking it multiple times during the day  - not only does their productivity decreases but  their stress levels will inevitably increase.

Constantly checking your email is a disruptive habit and unfortunately the average person will check their email 50 to 70 times a day. It takes approximately 24 minutes to fully disconnect after reading your emails, so imagine how much time ends up getting wasted during the work day. The founder of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington is one such person to have experienced these stresses and has openly admitted to routinely declaring email bankruptcy.  Peter Bregman is another who has experienced email overload and after taking a week’s technology vacation came back to find the expected overflowing inbox. Peter probably had the same feeling of dread that we all do after a period away from emails (mine included spitting coffee over my laptop), knowing that there will be a mountain of work to go through, but somehow he managed to clear a week’s worth of emails in only 3 hours.

The only issue is not that there is a continuous stream of communication coming your way, but also that it comes at you all of the time and this leads to its own issues. USA Today posted an article on workers suing for unpaid overtime, with the number of lawsuits increasing by 32% since 2008. I am sure you will be able to work out where this increase has came from, yes that is right, it is the evil zombie-esque horde of emails further invading people’s lives. Because of smartphones and other technology work is blending into personal time.

So what is the solution? One of our team has some great advice on How to keep a clean inbox that is well worth a read, but only a fraction of the real solution to the problem of overload. The question really becomes - will the solution be a change in behaviour, a change in technology or a change in the intelligence that surrounds our working lives? Please leave us your thoughts below on the best ways to keep our health (and of course to keep the zombies at bay!).

 Picture Credit: redzombie.com 

How to keep a clean inbox

 

HBR management tip of the day for the 18^th of May was focused on stopping email overload. Given the impact of email on our lives, this story seems one that likely caught the attention of most of their readers. Looking at their 3 tips, to me the one that seemed easier to say than do was “keep a clean inbox”.

"It’s easier to handle incoming messages without clutter staring back at you. Create a new folder called "Old Inbox" and put all your messages in there. Then when new email comes in, sort it right away."

Having implemented their tip on occasion – ie create a folder called old inbox and move everything there - it always seemed to me the hard part was then keeping it clean and I thought I might take a moment to share my methods for mostly doing this.

1. I set aside a time to process my inbox. My choice is first thing in the day. Some experts consider it shouldn't be the driving factor in the day but in the work I do, I'm often responding to other people, so my work is my inbox!

2. With all my accounts coming into one inbox*, it can seem an overwhelming mess, so I filter by the different types of messages I want to process, in my priority order. Then I work through the different filters until my inbox is empty.

3. Many of the messages that arrive in accounts that I am responsible for, need input from my colleagues. These I assign to the right person with questions. The act of assigning, unlike forward, takes the message out of my inbox (nice and clean, you see the appeal now) and puts it into their inbox. These messages invariably come back but when they do, the task they refer to is closer to being finished.

4. Where I can reply straight away, I do – general rule, can this be done in under one minute? If yes, then do so. Then I label and file the message, in a unified folder that colleagues can also access.

5. If I can't give the message away (assign) or answer straight away, I place it in the Reminder folder for a time that I set aside for doing these tasks. The message is then removed from my inbox until the time that I have specified, at which point it reappears with the notes I made for what I want myself to do.

I try to keep working through the messages until none remain, then refresh for those that have arrived (or been answered) during my processing session and work through the messages again. At that point – I turn off my email (no matter how much I want to keep hitting refresh to see what new messages have come in) because by this point, I should have figured out what tasks I need to do for the next few hours.

Then I repeat this process a couple of times during the day.

I wonder sometimes that it's taken me over fifteen years to learn this email best practice but for me it's better late than never! So my question goes out to the readers of this blog - where do you feel you're at with your ability to keep your inbox clean?

*Note: that some of the methods I use, are based around use of Unified Inbox. You may have other products you prefer to use, that may or may not have these functionalities.