Email Addictions

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"Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have,
and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful
lest you let other people spend it for you."

                                                      Carl Sandburg

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In my experience, email is the most insidious, seductive time-waster we face.

In fact, for many of us, email is a pernicious addiction.

Checking and replying to our electronically-delivered messages seems like a necessary, innocuous occupation, but it is also a major form of procrastination.

Sometimes we open our email browser with the intention of sending someone a specific message. Often, though, we are checking our email because, well, that is what we do. We check our inbox many times a day, even compulsively.

When I am giving workshops to faculty or graduate students, I take a poll of how frequently participants check their email. Everyone seems to check their email several times, and the majority of academics admit to more than a dozen incursions per day.

How much would you weigh if you ate a piece of chocolate every time you check your email? Would obesity - or even diabetes - be the result?

Here are seven specific tips for dealing with an email addiction:

1) Stop checking your email first thing in the morning.
For many of us, this is the most difficult – and most important – habit to break. “First things first” should be the guiding principle of your academic day. Work on your own research and writing for at least a half hour before opening your email program. Take the pragmatic and symbolic step of focusing on your academic priorities before responding to external input. If you make this a habit, I promise that you will be surprised and pleased with how much more you accomplish each day.

2) Turn off any “you’ve got mail” sounds or verbal cues.
It is important to prevent the tempting distraction of automatic notifications of new messages. We often respond to these signals like a dog conditioned to salivate at the sound of the bell: the familiar sound leads to an automatic email check. Don’t let external signals control your behavior. You should choose when it is time to look at your messages.

3) Close your email program between sessions.
If you check your email reflexively and automatically it will help to make the habit more difficult to begin. When you decide to send a message, it will take longer to open the program and enter a password, but this delay will give you a chance to ask yourself whether it is necessary to go online at that particular moment. You will consciously decide whether or not to have an email session.

3) Monitor your addiction.
How often do you check your email? Is your habit severe? For a few days, try counting how many times you open your email. Do you take a quick peek dozens of times each workday? Is this the best use of your time? Probably not.

4) Decide on a reasonable number of times per day to check your messages.
Next choose specific times of the day to open your inbox. At first, you may want to write those times in your daily planner until infrequent checks become a habit. Remind yourself that even when you are waiting for an important message, such as a response to a research question, or notification of a grant award, it rarely matters whether you read the message immediately or an hour later. For most academics, three email sessions per day should be sufficient. Does this sound draconian or depriving? Then you are probably an email addict. You may want to keep checking your email on an hourly basis – but at least make it a conscious choice.

5) Cut back slowly.  Are you accustomed to letting your own work become sidetracked by every message that arrives? Try cutting back to a quick check every hour, then slowly reduce the frequency and length of your email sessions. Watch to see whether you get more of your own work accomplished.

Are you finding yourself resistant to the measures I’ve suggested? You may want to ask yourself why it is so difficult to cut back or why you don’t want to give up the habit. Is email checking the only way you permit yourself to take a break? Can you think of a more relaxing or rewarding small break from work?

The basic premise of these suggestions is that our email addictions preempt conscious time management choices.

DECIDE THAT YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF YOUR EMAIL, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.

Do you remember life before email? We still got work done, right?

P.S. I think that email management is so important that I will devote further Monday Motivators to the topic.

Comments

[Nizam M. Selim]

Touche. E-mail addiction, or, for that matter, many of our obsessions with modern-day gadgets and gizmos have arguably alienated us from the simple things that make living and lifestyle worthwhile while we breath and live.

Time management, and, more precisely, life management per se requires of us to set our priorities right. Perhaps going back to nature, difficult though it may seem, is one way out for "thinking out of the box", if not living out of the box.

[academic coach]

Here's an email I got from a newsletter reader about this:

"Mary,

"I've been reading your newsletters for a while now, and really
appreciate them. Most of the time your topics strike a chord with me
and I feel better even just realizing that many other academics are
like me. I also usually get a lot out of your suggestions - I've
implemented quite a few and it has helped. This one, about email
management, is particularly important to me. I realized a long time
ago that it was an "addiction" - I would find myself checking email
many times a day, and just clicking "Get Mail" repeatedly because I
couldn't believe no one had sent me email in the last 3 seconds! :)
I'm only exaggerating a little. I've done some things to manage, but
I still feel like email has control of my life. I notice some
things, and I don't know what to do about them. Here are a few:

(1) The more email I respond to, the more comes back to me (!) which
usually means more work. I don't want more work, so I think maybe I
shouldn't respond, but then there is a lot of stress associated with
that too - the idea that I'm shirking responsibilities...

(2) If I practice your suggestions of not checking email many times a
day, I end up not being very responsive - in other words I feel like
it needs to be an "all or nothing" approach - if I'm attending to
other (more important) things I'm behind on email and the inevitable
(not as important but not easy to get out of) work that comes with it.

(3) A while ago I tried to deal with email in part by trying not to
"touch" any message more than once - I try to either respond
immediately, delete junk, file things that are informational only,
etc - sort of the "GTD" approach. This is good - it is less
stressful when there are only a handful of emails at a time in my
inbox and I do find that it helps stop my brain from continually
working on what I need to remember to do... However, as helpful as I
think it is to take that approach, I also find that maintaining those
habits perpetuates the email addiction habit. I feel like I need to
keep checking email and deal with messages as soon as they come in in
order to stay on top of that plan, but that leads to me checking
email millions of times a day and continually worrying about whether
new things are going to get added to my to-do list... Again, the
"all or nothing" feeling."

What do you think?

[Inge]

You are so right on the e-mail thing! One of the things that helped me get rid of the 'addiction' is to direct certain messages to appropriate folders, such as 'newsletters' or 'article alerts', because I find the only e-mail that makes me divert from my priorities is e-mail in my inbox. I only check the message folders once a week. Similarly, messages from certain important people or with a specific content get a color code, which makes it easy to prioritise e-mail.

Shutting down the e-mail program is a good thing, although I do miss all the anouncements of cake at coffee time... Also, people get used to the speed at which you reply to e-mail and expect you to keep replying within that certain time frame. So, I let people get used to a delayed response and now they no longer ask me things that need a quick reply, but will be solved allready if you leave it for a day.

One thing that bothers me about Microsoft Outlook (standard at my workplace), is that you cannot open your calendar or tasklist separate from e-mail. Sometimes, you just need to see what is in the calendar or be able to have appointment alerts, while not having the risk of being diverted by e-mail messages!

[Linda]

Excellent! Right on! It's time to call our growing, excessive preoccupation with email what it is - an addiction. Good, solid, concrete steps to help those who are trapped by this problem. I will be passing on your article to those I work with.

[CogSciLibrarian]

Excellent ideas! I have already turned off my email alerts, so I only look at email when I want to. But it is always open, so I do look at it often. In another life, I used Eudora, which you can set to check email at certain intervals. I had it checking every 30 minutes, which was helpful. You can't do that in Outlook -- it comes in when it comes in.

I will definitely mull over tip #4, "Decide on a reasonable number of times per day to check your messages."

[Edie]

I completely agree. The first things first principle guides me in the morning, and sometimes, when work is stressful, it is very hard to adhere to. But life is much more productive and psychologically sound to be the master of the technology and not the slave!

[John Spear]

I have found Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero concept to be helpful.