You May Be Suffering From Email Addiction

Email is just part of our lives. Most of us send and receive close to one hundred emails a day; we rely on email to conduct business, to gather information, and to stay in touch with friends. But our dependency on email can be dangerously distracting and, for many, symptomatic of addiction. Social software consultant and writer Suw Charman-Anderson discusses the unintended effects of email on our productivity through her article “Email Becomes a Dangerous Distraction,” and, I have summarized some of her points below.

If You Are Addicted To Email, You Are Not Alone

Charman-Anderson begins by discussing the surprising results from recent studies on email behavior, providing quantitative evidence for a problem many of us are all too aware of.

• 56% of email users spend more than two hours a day in their inbox;
• 64% of users claim to check their email once an hour, and 35% said they check for new messages every 15 minutes;
• It takes an average of 64 seconds just to recover your train of thought after an interruption by email;
• Most users 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;
• One study reports that 70% of email alerts get a reaction within six seconds.

Email may be an Addiction

Charman-Anderson continues by offering an interesting parallel between the compulsive behavior of gambling addicts and those of us who just can’t stop checking our inbox every 15 minutes.

According to Tom Stafford, cognitive neuroscientist and co-author of “Mind Hacks,” the same fundamental learning mechanisms that drive gambling addicts are also at work in email users. He writes:

“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. 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.”

Consequently, as Charman-Anderson writes, “this is enough to make it difficult for us to resist checking email, even when we’ve only just looked.” It is, therefore, little wonder why so many of us ignore the advice of productivity gurus like David Allen, Tim Ferriss, and  Scott Allen, who suggest that we should only check our email once or twice a day.

Suggesting to anyone that they should only check their email once or twice a day is a tough sale. I feel compelled to check my business email account at least two times every hour. I am not sure if this is symptomatic of addiction or just common business sense; but like most of you, I need to respond to my work-related emails in a timely manner.

However, their recommendation is easier to chew when applied to my personal email and social networking accounts. In contrast to work-related messages, my personal emails and Facebook wallposting do not require an immediate response. I have recently begun to limit the number of times I check my personal messaging accounts and it has really worked wonders and helped to reduce the email deluge.

If you suffer from email overload, simply cutting back the number of times you check your personal email is a relatively painless and effective solution to improving your daily productivity. To help me resist the impulse to check my personal email, I use NutshellMail.com to send email alerts to my work email account every three hours. In a single email, NutshellMail provides a quick snapshot of all my new messages so I can passively and productively access and keep track of all my personal accounts.