In a study last year, Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University,
England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train
of thought after interruption by email (bit.ly/email2). So people who check
their email every five minutes waste 81/2hours a week figuring out what
they were doing moments before.
It had been assumed that email doesn’t cause interruptions because the
recipient chooses when to check for and respond to email (bit.ly/email3).
But Dr Jackson found that people tend to respond to email as it arrives,
taking an average of only one minute and 44 seconds to act upon a new
email notification; 70% of alerts got a reaction within six seconds. That’s
faster than letting the phone ring three times.
Keeping control of the inbox
If you find your mouse straying towards the “check email” button far too often, try these tactics:
- Turn off intrusive alerts. Anything that pops up, flashes, or goes “ding!” will interrupt you when you’re trying to focus and will trigger a response to check your email.
- Set your email client to display just the title and first few lines of the email, so you can easily decide if it is important enough to deal with right now.
- Use other tools. Twitter and instant messaging (IM) are better for asking short questions of chosen groups. Wikis are better for collaborating on documents. Blogs are better for publishing information and having informal conversations.
- Send fewer emails. Do you need to hit “reply to all”?
- Schedule your email. Set aside time each day to deal with your inbox and ignore it for the rest of the day. Most people check first thing in the morning and late afternoon.
Suw Charman-Anderson is an expert in collaboration and communications
This entire excerpt was taken from an article entitled Email becomes a dangerous distraction by Suw Charman-Anderson September 9, 2008
Filed under: Office, Time Management | Tagged: get organized
