There's a growing backlash against our growing in-boxes. A new crop of entrepreneurs has sprung up with antidotes -- some of which create more e-mail.
By Leslie Brenner,
It happened with cigarettes. It happened with red meat. And carbs. And SUVs. And now it's happening with e-mail. The preferred communication channel of millions of Americans is no longer cool. According to a growing number of academics, technologists and psychologists, our dependence on e-mail -- the need to attend to a constantly beeping in-box -- is creating anxiety in the workplace, adversely affecting the ability to focus, diminishing productivity and threatening family bonds. The problem has become so severe that a new crop of entrepreneurs has sprung up with antidotes -- which sometimes involve creating more e-mail.
Technology geeks who not long ago were comparing the size of their in-boxes as a gauge of Digital Age machismo are now attempting to wean themselves from Outlook and Gmail. Behind the e-mail backlash is a growing perception that, despite its convenience and everything positive it has brought to work and leisure, the tide has turned, and now once-friendly e-mail is a monster that's threatening to ruin our lives. It chases you, says Natalie Firstenberg, a
Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, says that what's wrong with e-mail is that it simulates forward motion but doesn't necessarily mean action. E-mail is used as a self-validation tool by people to procrastinate and to re-create activity versus productivity, he says. Ferriss, who says he used to receive close to 300 e-mails per hour, is now checking his personal account only twice a day. Tantek Celik, a computer scientist who has worked for Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Apple Computer and Technorati, a blog search engine, proclaimed several months ago on his blog: EMAIL shall henceforth be known as EFAIL.
As legions of knowledge workers vacation this summer, the question of whether to take along the BlackBerry is more complicated than ever. Do, and the vacation might not be such a vacation after all. Don't, and you're likely to return to an in-box that takes hours to clear or, worse, to the dreaded your mailbox has exceeded its limits message. Meanwhile, e-mail, long hailed as a timesaving boon, has taken over the workplace like a midsummer algae bloom. Tony Wright, a software developer in Seattle who recently launched (in beta form) RescueTime, a program that tracks how users spend their time on the computer, has found that 38% of office workers' time is spent on communication applications such as e-mail.
According to a report to be published in October by the New York-based research firm Basex, interruptions such as spam, other unnecessary e-mail and instant-messages take up 28% of the average knowledge worker's day. On top of that is what Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira refers to as recovery time -- the time to get back to where you were before you were interrupted, which Spira says is 10 to 20 times the duration of the interruption. These interruptions account for up to 2.1 hours per worker per day. Multiply that by 56 million knowledge workers in the
Susan Jamison, 48, a commercial litigation partner at Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass, a
E-mail backlash started in earnest last year with no e-mail Fridays at companies such as
We all felt that information overload was something that was such a big problem that some companies were beginning to be aware of it but a lot of people didn't realize the magnitude of the problem, Hazarika says. And we could increase awareness. Ironically, a number of the group's members work for the companies that created software that caused the problem in the first place -- including four at Microsoft Research, creator of Outlook. E-mail, Hazarika says, was the conference's main focus because it is very much the primary cause of information overload.
It's also one of the worst culprits in a growing global lack of focus, says Maggie Jackson, author of the recently published book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. We're highly connected,
Less than half a day goes by and you'll get an e-mail saying, 'Why haven't you responded to my e-mail?' she says. The expectation, because you've sent it, is the other person is looking at his screen all the time and his job is to look at his screen waiting for e-mails. According to
Historically, dark ages have sometimes been periods of technical advancement, she explains, but they're ultimately times of cultural decline. I think we're defining our own dark age by skimming along on the surface of life and relationships and thoughts. And it's certainly a dark age when we're faced with an ignorance born not out of a lack of information but out of an inability to create knowledge out of the information around us.
Lately, a mini-industry has sprung up around finding solutions to e-mail overload. Hazarika's ClearContext software firm has developed a program that manages Outlook, for example, offering features including a do not disturb button, an automated unsubscribe feature and an optimized folder filing system.
Another program, Xobni (in-box backward) determines the hot zones when a person tends to receive the most e-mail, then batches e-mail during those times and sends out an auto-response indicating the user is checking e-mail only at certain times. Then there are those who are just throwing up their hands. Case in point:
