Comments on: Addicted to Email? You’re Not Alone

By: wormman

wormman — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:11 +0000

I admit that I’m at in the 16% range. I sleep with my Black Berry and check it when if I get up to go to the bathroom. I know it’s nuts but I have a business and have become addicted to always being on. I actually like being that connected.

By: Tyssen

Tyssen — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:58:43 +0000

As of Opera 9.5, when a new email arrives, the little message indicator that appears at the bottom right of the window tells you who it’s from and its subject which means you can quickly take it in and decide whether it needs attention sooner rather than later and you don’t have to stop what you’re doing.

By: Mark Harbottle

Mark Harbottle — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 05:46:59 +0000

How about only allowing email to be delivered three times a day to everyone in your company? Say once in the morning, once around lunch time, and once late in the afternoon. Wonder if that would work. Let’s try it at SitePoint and report back on how it went ;)

By: Kevin Yank

Kevin Yank — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 04:33:37 +0000

The addiction, as I see it, is not to email itself, but to checking email too frequently, or worse yet, becoming a slave to the “ding”—dropping whatever it is you’re doing every time your email application automatically downloads new email and alerts you that it’s waiting to be read. It can be a difficult cultural shift in some companies that have become reliant on short turn-around times on email messages; nevertheless, I strongly recommend making the transition from continuously checking your email throughout the day to limiting yourself to one or two concentrated “email dashes”, during which you focus on processing your email. Most importantly, you need to switch off the alerts that your email program throws up to signal new email—or limit those alerts to email that has been identified by an automated filter as being worthy of interrupting your other work. Highly recommended on this subject is the Inbox Zero series of articles (or, for those in a hurry, the video), by Merlin Mann. More recently, read Chronic Procrastination and the Cost of the “Ding!”. A particularly relevant snippet:

Even the beeps notifying the arrival of email are said to be causing a 0.5 per cent drop in gross domestic product in the United States, costing the economy $70bn a year.