People are hero topplers. I've claimed INBOX.victory and all people want to do is take that from me. Fortunately I am an email jedi master and have developed refined strategies to help stay on top of it without slaving myself to the computer. Here are some methods I've learned to help cope with this mess:
- Check your email at regular times during the day- So associate doing it with another task, like in the morning and at night when you brush your teeth. This is mostly impossible now because people send "urgent" mail that is expected to be addressed within a couple hours. I tried this for a little while but it usually just upset people around me. Just a note- email is modern day mail. It shouldn't be considered an instantaneous form of communication. Thats was instant messengers are for, or you know, the phone.
- Set it to a lower refresh rate- checking email doesn't have to be a nervous tick. Set it to refresh every half hour and then you can check it 10 times less an hour.
- Combine inboxes- All of my email is routed through my gmail account so I have fewer inboxes. Sneaky, sneaky.
- Filters, flags and folders- I've mentioned these magic tricks in earlier posts. I think I get 1/2 of the emails I used to get because now most things get automatically labeled and put away in archives before I even open them. These are usually listserves I belong to which I want to stay updated on, but not every day, more like once a week.
I came across this information in a Slashdot article posted a couple days ago.
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. So people who check their email every five minutes waste 81/2hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before. Dr Renaud's team discovered that while 64% of respondents claimed to check their email once an hour, and 35% said they checked every 15minutes, they were actually checking it much more frequently - about every five minutes. For some people, checking email is no longer a conscious and deliberate act, but a compulsion they are barely aware of. Tom Stafford, a lecturer at the University of Sheffield, England, and co-author of the book Mind Hacks, believes that the same fundamental learning mechanisms that drive gambling addicts are also at work in email users. "Both slot machines and email follow something called a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule' which has been established as the way to train in the strongest habits," he says."This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful - an invite out or maybe some juicy gossip - and I get a reward." This is enough to make it difficult for us to resist checking email.'