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.

Two Outlook Add-ins You Can’t Ignore

Many of you are all too aware that Microsoft’s Outlook is less than perfect. However, if you are like me and stuck in your old Outlook ways, I have two great recommendations that can significantly improve the speed and performance of Outlook. There are many new and not-so-new Outlook add-ins that you can download for free, however my two favorites are Outlook Attachment Remover and YouSendIt’s Outlook Plug-in.

The Outlook Attachment Remover is perhaps the quickest and easiest way to improve Outlook’s performance. This plug-in works by removing attachments from your Outlook files and saving them to your hard drive. What I love about this application is that you can still access your attachments in the same manner as before; however because the large files are removed from Outlook, the client’s speed and performance is greatly improved. In less than five minutes, I was able to automatically free up more than 500MB of storage space. EZDetach offers a low-cost application with additional features; however, I found the free version offered by www.kopf.com.br/outlook/ to be more than adequate.

YouSendIt’s Outlook Plug-in is another great tool for reducing the size of both your Outlook files and the storage space of your recipient’s email client. YouSendIt offers a free service for sending large files via email. The service works by uploading your attachment files and sending a link to your intended recipient so they can download your documents directly from the Web. (The service offers a subscription service with additional features as well). I have used this service in the past; however I was not sold on it until they released their Outlook add-in, which enables me to use the service directly through Outlook. The application is very easy to use; all you have to do is attach a document to an email by clicking on the YouSendIt toolbar within Outlook. The service will automatically upload your documents and directly insert the link in your email message. In addition to improving your Outlook’s performance, your recipients will appreciate the reduced file size of your message.

For more suggestions on how to get the most out of Outlook, I recommend you read Arrow Tips by Misty Khan of Advena Artemis.

Gmail’s Mail Fetcher: Why You Shouldn’t Forward Messages into a Single Account?

So what’s up with e-mail forwarding? Most people have multiple e-mail accounts and find it a pain to access each one individually. Many email providers allow users to set their accounts to automatically forward all messages to a single universal email address. So why don’t more people do this?

I have found that most people shy away from email forwarding because they like to keep their inboxes separate. According to eMarketer, more than 94% of users in the U.S. (~160 million) utilize at least two e-mail accounts, and 65% of users (~128 million) employ three or more (3+) accounts. A principal reason users have multiple accounts is to stay organized. Personally, I have an account for business, an account for personal use, and an account for my newsletters (my “bacon” or “becn”). I like it that way. I know when I am in my business account, it’s all business. When I am in my personal account, it’s all fun. And my third account is for shopping, reading random newsletters, and killing time.

Gmail offers a forwarding service called Mail Fetcher. Mail Fetcher allows users to access up to 5 non-Gmail email accounts from within the Gmail interface. You can set Mail Fetcher to tag the messages by their source accounts through a color-coded labeling feature.

I am not sold on Mail Fetcher for various reasons. The first reason is that users are required to configure their POP3 server settings to utilize this solution; and most people do not know how to do this. Furthermore, some email services do not offer POP3 capability and others, like Yahoo and Hotmail/Live, charge for the privilege. Most importantly, however, I don’t like Mail Fetcher because it is not an effective organization tool. In my opinion, there is no substitute for the folder structure offered by email clients like Outlook or Thunderbird. Because you cannot filter or sort messages by their source account into separate folders, Mail Fetcher and other forwarding features simply add more clutter to your inbox. I have separate accounts for very specific reasons; my email needs to be organized and neither Mail Fetcher nor email forwarding is the solution. Sorry Google.

Take Back Your Inbox: How To Better Manage Your Inbox

If you are feeling overwhelmed by email overload, you are not alone. The average email user receives more than 50 messages a day and many business users are hit up with over 200 emails a day. It is time to take your inbox back, and with a little help from Scott Allen and Timothy Ferriss, I will tell you how to better manage your email.

While at SxSWi in Austin, TX, I had the great fortune to meet veteran entrepreneur and email consulting expert Scott Allen, co-author of “The Virtual Handshake,” (with David Teten). This post takes the best points from Allen’s chapter “Manage the Email Deluge,” and Ferriss’ “The Four Hour Work Week.” Both offer time-saving tips for managing your inbox, and your entire life for that matter. While some of their ideas seem radical, I promise they can help alleviate your inbox woes.

In short, Allen and Ferriss advocate handling email when you choose to rather than when it arrives. This involves checking your inbox less frequently, making quick decisions as to how you will handle each message, and creating a simple organizational structure using folders.

Review Regularly But Not Often
The best way to regain control of your inbox, is to develop a regular schedule for checking email. Checking email on the fly any time your inbox beeps is a very poor use of time. Allen and Ferriss, both, recommend turning off your email alert tool and checking your inbox once or twice a day. Ferriss even suggest setting an email auto-response that tells senders when you check your inbox and to let them know that you will eventually get back to them.

I will be the first to admit that for many people this is not practical, but if you are checking your inbox every twenty minutes or on the fly, try setting specific hours in the day to check mail. Honestly, if something is urgent, the sender should pick up the phone or ping you through instant messaging.

Keep Your Inbox Empty
Keeping your inbox empty does not mean you should immediately respond to every email. In fact, Allen argues the opposite. Referencing David Allen’s (no relation) “Getting Things Done,” Scott Allen explains that you have three options for dealing with messages: 1) Do It, 2) Delegate It, or 3) Defer It. If you can answer the email in two minutes or less, knock it out. If you are not the right person to answer the email, forward it immediately to the person who is. And most importantly, if an answer can wait, place the email in a To-Do folder and handle it later when you have more time.

Organize Around Action, Not Data
A simple organizational structure is critical. However, instead of organizing folders based on projects or subjects, you should create folders based on how you should handle email. Allen recommends the following folders:

• Inbox: A temporary place for your emails to arrive and sit until you to determine how to deal with each one.
• Deadlines: Create a separate folder for each deadline (ie: by day, week, project, etc.) The folder will dictate when you answer the email. For example, emails placed in the Tuesday folder will be addressed on Tuesday.
• ASAP: This is a folder for emails that you can answer whenever you have time; as Allen points out ASAP does not mean urgent, it means any time you can get to it.
• Delegated: This folder should store emails that have been sent to others to deal with. You should check this periodically to make sure each message has been answered.
• Archive: These folders can be organized by project, customer, date, data or whatever works for you. If you use your delete folder as an archive; be sure to periodically save all messages onto a disk or external hard drive and purge the folder.

Don’t over Organize, Rely on Search
Don’t make your organizational structure too complicated; it should be intuitive and easy to follow. Most email clients offer search capabilities, which can help you find what you are looking for.

Use Multiple Email Accounts
Allen writes “you can save yourself much time and aggravation, and potentially protect your job, by keeping your personal and business email accounts segregated.” I have been doing this for years and have even created a third email account for e-commerce, ezines and other becn mail (becn, unlike spam is permission-based email that you want to read but just not immediately). Keeping separate inboxes is a great way to prioritize your life and keep you focused while at work. In addition, having a second email account with a free webmail provider like Gmail or Yahoo ensures that if you leave your current employer, you will still have a way to be contacted via email. If you find it difficult to manage your multiple email accounts or you can’t access your personal email at work, you can use NutshellMail, which offers a free service to help you manage, access and monitor your various messaging accounts.

If you found this post to be informative, I highly recommend you read The Virtual Handshake,The Four Hour Work Week, and Getting Things Done. All three books are about taking back your life and leveraging technology to simplify how you work and live. They have had a very significant on my life and have enabled me to get more (work and play) out of my day.

Twitter: For the “Anti-Socially Social”

Is Twitter anti-social? Twitter, the SMS-enabled social networking service, has become increasingly popular over the past year. This was quite apparent at the SxSW Interactive Conference in Austin, TX, where the most common pick-up line was “What is your Twitter name?” (Second only to “I follow you on Twitter.”) At every panel I went to, I noticed audience members meticulously thumbing messages on their phones to the Twitter community instead of listening attentively and politely to the speakers. At most conferences, this would be considered rude and unprofessional. But SxSW is not like most conferences and I did not hear of any panelist complaining. So I didn’t think much of it.

Then one night at dinner with @ericaogrady (Erica O’Grady), @tamar (Tamar Weinberg), @trevinorama (Marla Trevino) @antifreeze (Seth Blank), @davidlyman (David Lyman) I barely noticed the silence at the table as we all sat typing “tweets” into our phones. In fact, @ericaogrady and I (half jokingly) spent much of the dinner communicating to each other over Twitter even though we were sitting directly across the table. No doubt, this was unusual, and perhaps some might call it anti-social. But I would like to propose a new term to describe Twitter users:

Twitter users are “Anti-Socially Social.”

I usually don’t speak in oxymoron, but in this case it is perfectly appropriate. Twitter is the ultimate just-in-time social network, accessible anywhere there is cell-phone coverage (ie: everywhere). The people using Twitter are inherently social; Twitter is, after all, a social networking service. The problem is, however, Twitter is utterly addictive and perhaps insanely distracting.

In the corporate world, it is considered rude to send messages on your phone while attending a meeting, panel, and especially dinner. In fact, I once got called out for doing so during a meeting with a very high-up C-level. Even hanging out with my friends, I am harassed for messaging into my phone, instead of conversing like a normal human. But I am not anti-social. In fact, I am way too social and Twitter is my pusher-man.

While, I am the first to admit that you should probably limit your phone use when in the presence of other people, I can’t sit back and let people say that Twitter is for the anti-social. So next time, someone complains that you are being anti-social for sending too many tweets, remember to tell them “Dude, I am not anti-social…I am anti-socially social.”

Yours Truly,

@mschmulen

Email is the Ultimate Social Network: Watch out Facebook and Myspace.

MySpace and Facebook are generally accepted as the largest and most popular social networks on the Web; but I would like to propose that this is a misconception. The largest and most popular social network is….YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT.

Most of us have been using email long before Friendster came and went and Facebook rose and shined. Over the years we have collected hundreds and thousands of contacts. We communicate with these people regularly through email. It is likely that we have not even met many of these people in person. It is likely that we were connected to some of these people through others that are already in our contact list.

The problem with email as we know it today, however, is that it does not do a good job of unhinging the underlying social graph within our contact list. Helping people connect to friends of friends and exposing personal profiles of these contacts has been exclusively the role played by social networks. But that is about to change.

Xobni (Inbox spelled sdrawkcab…I mean backwards) is a new startup that has created an add-on application to Outlook. Xobni not only helps you to better organize your email and contacts, but it also tells you everyone in your contact list that has sent an email to each other…it “expose the hidden social network” in your email. It therefore connects your entire contact universe, even if certain contacts are not in your MySpace or Facebook friends list.

Xobni is simply brilliant, and the Valley Behemoths Yahoo and Google agree. Both have announced plans to add features to their existing email and personalized home page services that resemble the key attributes of many social networks.

While Google is holding its card close to the vest, Yahoo has been more forthcoming. They claim to be testing a method that can automatically determine the strength of your relationship to someone by how often you exchange e-mail and instant messages with him or her (very Xobni-esque). For those who opt-in, Yahoo will share contacts and display personal profiles in a similar fashion to Facebook. According to Brad Garlinghouse, VP at Yahoo, “The exciting part is that a lot of this information already exists on our network, but it’s dormant.” Consequently, adding social network-like features is a natural evolutionary step for email service providers.

Given that Yahoo and Google/Gmail already have hundreds of millions of users, I think with time, they will prove that email is, in fact, the ultimate social network. Factor in the instant messaging services not currently offered by most social networks, Facebook and MySpace may find themselves playing catch-up with the Big Boyz.

For more information on this subject, check out Saul Hansell’s article in the NY Times, “Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-mail into a Social Network.”

Email is dead, Long live email

IIs email dead? I have heard this declaration many times and from several people you might call Web 2.0 influencers. Honestly, it makes me laugh. I mean no disrespect, but how can anyone make such a statement?

The proof, after all, is in the pudding. In the U.S. alone, there are over 170 million email users; that represents roughly 60% of the U.S. population and more than 90% of U.S. internet users. There are more than 1.4 billion active email accounts worldwide. According to eMarketer, email is the most commonly used application of the internet, and 48% of users report spending at least one hour per day checking email.

So why do some very well-educated people make such statements? Is the number of active email accounts declining? No!!! In fact, eMarketer claims that the number of email users in the U.S. will grow 14% to 194 million users by 2011.

So what’s up?

To give these “influencers” the benefit of doubt, I think what they are trying to say is that there exist newer and in some cases better ways for users to communicate over the Net. Instant messaging services such as AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, Skype, etc. are great for real-time communication. Many corporations are utilizing these services to improve worker efficiency. In addition, instant messaging aggregation companies, such as Meebo and Trillian have enjoyed tremendous user adoption.

IM is only one of the many new online communication technologies that have began to proliferate. Many users are going to their social networks to communicate with friends and colleagues. Web2.0 startups like Twitter and Jabber have merged SMS text messaging and IM and are currently the talk of the town (at least on the Web).

I will concede that many of these new services offer the advantage of real-time two-way communication. I personally utilize many of the above-mentioned services; and they are great. But I will never give up my many email accounts. I will continue to use them as my primary form of online communication. Furthermore, as long as most global companies continue to rely on email, it is not going anywhere. If email is dead, then long live email.

How Do You Do? How do you Email?

Please pardon my interruption, but I noticed you from the other side of the Web and I was curious if I can buy you a drink. And by the way, how do you email?

I know it’s a terrible pickup line. And no, I have never followed up a pick up line with a discussion about email. In fact, I really don’t throw out many pick up lines. But “How do you email” is a question that I ask many people I meet. There are so many ways to email; most people have multiple accounts; and I am genuinely curious how the average user manages her many inboxes.

How do you email? Do you login to each account separately through each provider’s webmail client? Do you use an email client application, like Outlook, Thunderbird, or Lotus Notes? Do you forward all your email accounts to a single inbox? Do you use your Blackberry or iPhone?

I haven’t conducted research that you could necessarily call “scientific”, but I have asked this question many times. It turns out that the majority of email users choose to login to each account separately. I find this interesting because it sounds like a burden—an inefficient way to utilize a tool that is supposed to make communication more convenient.

So how do you email? Let me know. Maybe we can talk it over a drink.

How Many Email Accounts Do You Have?

How many email accounts do you have…2, 3, 17?

It is probably not a profound revelation, but most people have at least 2 email accounts. In fact, according to eMarketer (September 2007), of the 170 million U.S. email users, more than 94% (~160 million) have at least two email accounts and 65% of users (~128 million) utilize three or more accounts. I think it important to note that these stats do not include social networking accounts, which, if you really think about it, are dressed up messaging services. That means less than 6% of U.S. email users, a measly 10mm people, utilize a single email account.

Personally I have 4 accounts, but I only actively use two. I use one account for my business and a second for personal communications with friends and family. I rarely check my other two accounts, one of which is used for “junk” and “becn” (newsletters and e-commerce) and the other, well, it’s a relic of a former life, a dormant account that I just can’t part with.

So how do you use your various email accounts? Why do you keep them separate, if you do?

How Many Email Accounts Do You Have? 1) 1 2) 2 3) 3 4) 4 5) 5 6) >5 View Results Make your own poll