Comments on: Is electronic mail stressing you out?

By: joequincy

joequincy — Sat, 24 May 2008 05:02:24 +0000

I check whenever I get a notification (bouncing dock icon if I’m using a mac, popup in the bottom-right if I’m using a PC email client, or a little ding if I’m using the Gmail notifier on either mac or PC)

IMAP and automatic checking has made it so that I don’t have to worry about “checking” my email, since I don’t have to use a web portal to keep it stored on the server, and I don’t have to worry about missing an important email with the notifications. If I leave my desk, I can always bring up the window for an instant and see if anything has arrived, but I very rarely get stressed about it.

Then again, I know that if the sender doesn’t get an error response, it means the recipient has the email in their box… so I don’t worry about instant replies. I get to things when I have time, and it’s worked out well for me so far.

By: Kyle

Kyle — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 10:04:23 +0000

In my job (developer) I spend so much time having to reply to emails from project management, QA, testing, other team members, admin etc that it’s rare to get even quarter an hour of focused work. It’s exhausting and distracting to have to do this day-in day-out and it reduces work throughput to a crawl.

One guy (older – 50s) I was talking to about it hit the nail on the head perhaps when he pointed out that people seemed to think things through a lot less these days and just phoned instead!.. ie. if they didn’t know something they just automatically phone/email someone else.

Now although I know that trying to reinvent the wheel yourself or not asking for help when you need it – is a bad thing… the increasing culture of “think less and ask more” surely is the cause of the much of the daily “internal” email traffic in many companies – and is a waste of resources and a constant stress for those involved.

By: Jonathan Franzone

Jonathan Franzone — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 03:14:50 +0000

I keep my email open and have it set to auto-check every 5 minutes. Whenever I receive a message I’ll glance at who it is from and the subject. If it looks like something that warrants immediate attention (very rare) then I’ll attend to it. Otherwise if I’m in the middle of something I’ll either leave it marked as unread or flag it for follow up. Then when I get a break from my work I’ll take some time to address the various emails that I’ve queued up for handling.

By: Andrew Christiansen

Andrew Christiansen — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 23:12:45 +0000

nice article!

By: Ritu

Ritu — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 01:46:09 +0000

I suffer from stress a lot due to my habit of frequently checking email. I tend to check my email probably 5 times within 30 mins if I am expecting something. And that definitely slows me down in terms of productivity.

http://www.worknplay.net

By: PD

PD — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 18:43:45 +0000

Ditto on Winston. My computer rings when I get an email.

By: Winston

Winston — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 18:07:31 +0000

I don’t check my email, my computer informs me when I receive a message.

By: Andrew Odlum

Andrew Odlum — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 17:30:57 +0000

I don’t have a set time period for checking emails while at work. I check it whenever I see a notification that I have a new message. I would say that on average I am probably checking my email every 10-15 minutes.

In my particular case I do at least 50% of my work via email so the constant checking is not hurting my productivity. If anything it is helping it. However, I think this will vary quite a bit from industry to industry. Almost every industry uses email today, however some positions will naturally do more with the technology than others.

This study does not surprise me. With so many emails traveling across the world every second we are barraged with new tasks and problems all the time. Years ago when you came back from vacation you might have a voice mail message or two waiting for you when you return. Now, when someone comes back from vacation they still have the voice mail messages and now might have a hundred emails waiting for them to read. The digital age has certainly added new problems to productivity.

However, without email the business world would slow down dramatically. We can’t escape from the new technology. Although it can be stressful our jobs would be even more difficult without it.