Shane Parrish bets you can't even finish reading this story without checking
your email once. Yeah, he says, it's time to power down:
"I've
been giving a lot of thought to my habits recently and how they affect
me. One thing I've placed an increasingly watchful eye on is email.
Email
seems pervasive in our lives. We check email on the bus, we check it in
the bath. We check it first thing in the morning. We even check it
midconversation, with the belief that no one will notice.
John Freeman argues in The Tyranny of Email that the average office worker "sends and receives two hundred emails a day."
Email makes us reactive, as we race to keep up with the never-ending onslaught.
In
the past, only a few professions — doctors, plumbers perhaps, emergency
service technicians, prime ministers — required this kind of state of
being constantly on call. Now, almost all of us live this way.
Everything must be attended to — and if it isn't, chances are another
email will appear in a few hours asking if indeed the first message was
received at all.
Working at the speed of email is like trying to
gain a topographic understanding of our daily landscape from a speeding
train — and the consequences for us as workers are profound.
Interrupted every thirty seconds or so, our attention spans are
fractured into a thousand tiny fragments. The mind is denied the
experience of deep flow, when creative ideas flourish and complicated
thinking occurs. We become task-oriented, tetchy, terrible at listening
as we try to keep up with the computer. The email inbox turns our mental
to-do list into a palimpsest — there's always something new and even
more urgent erasing what we originally thought was the day's priority.
Incoming mail arrives on several different channels — via email,
Facebook, Twitter, instant message — and in this era of backup we're
sure that we should keep records of our participation in all these
conversations. The result is that at the end of the day we have a few
hundred or even a few thousand emails still sitting in our inbox.
Part
of us likes all of the attention email gives us. It has been shown that
email is addictive in many of the same ways slot machines are addictive
— variable reinforcement.
Tom Stafford, a lecturer in the
Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield, explains: "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." [The Tyranny of Email]
There are chemical
reasons this happens that go well beyond our love of gossip. If we're
doing something that pays out randomly, our brain releases dopamine when
we get something good and our body learns that we need to keep going if
we want a reward.
"Ironically," Freeman writes, "tools meant to
connect us are enabling us to spend even more time apart." The
consequences are disastrous.
Spending our days communicating
through this medium, which by virtue of its sheer volume forces us to
talk in short bursts, we are slowly eroding our ability to explain — in a
careful, complex way — why it is so wrong for us and to complain,
resist, or redesign our workdays so that they are manageable.
Life on the email treadmill
"If
the medium is the message, what does that say about new survey results
that found nearly 60 percent of respondents check their email when
they're answering the call of nature." — Michelle Masterson
When
you arrive at work and there are twenty emails in your inbox, the weight
of that queue is clear: everyone is waiting for you.
So you
clear and clear and clear, only to learn that the faster you reply, the
faster the replies come boomeranging back to you — thanks, follow-ups,
additional requests, and that one-line sinker, "How are you doing these
days?" It shouldn't be such a burden to be asked your state of mind. In
the workplace, however, where the sheer volume of correspondence can
feel as if it has been designed on the high to enforce a kind of
task-oriented tunnel vision, such a question is either a trapdoor or an
escape hatch.
At the workplace it used to be hard to share things without a lot of
friction. Now sharing is frictionless and free. CC'ing and forwarding to
keep people "in the loop" has become a mixed blessing. Now everything
is collaborative and if people are left off emails they literally feel
left out.
"What information consumes is rather obvious: it
consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information
creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention
efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might
consume it." — Herb Simon
We live in a culture in which doing
everything all at once is admired and encouraged — have our spreadsheet
open while we check email, chin on the phone into our shoulder, and
accept notes from a passing office messenger. Our desk is Grand Central
and we are the conductor, and it feels good. Why? If we're this busy,
clearly we're needed; we have a purpose. We are essential. The internet
and email have certainly created a "desire to be in the know, to not be
left out, that ends up taking up a lot of our time" — at the expense of
getting things done, said Mark Ellwood, the president of Pace
Productivity, which studies how employees spend their time.
Of
course we can't multitask the way technology leads us to believe we can.
"Multitasking," Walter Kirn wrote in an essay called "The Autumn of the
Multitaskers," messes with the brain in several ways:"
At the
most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires — the
constant switching and pivoting — energize regions of the brain that
specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and
simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to
memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the
expense of whatever it is that we're supposed to be concentrating on.
What
does this mean in practice? Consider a recent experiment at UCLA, where
researchers asked a group of 20-somethings to sort index cards in two
trials, once in silence and once while simultaneously listening for
specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds. The subjects'
brains coped with the additional task by shifting responsibility from
the hippocampus — which stores and recalls information — to the
striatum, which takes care of rote, repetitive activities. Thanks to
this switch, the subjects managed to sort the cards just as well with
the musical distraction — but they had a much harder time remembering
what, exactly, they'd been sorting once the experiment was over.
Even
worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of
stress related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down
our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the
short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability
to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to
atrophy.
"In other words," writes Freeman in The Tyranny of Email,
"a work climate that revolves around multitasking, and constant
interruptions has narrowed our cognitive window down to a care, basic
facility: rote, mechanical tasks."
We like to think we are in
control of our environment, that we act upon it and shape it to our
needs. It works both ways, though; changes we make to the world can have
unseen ramifications that impact our ability to live in it.
Attention
means being present. Being present helps mindfullness. Thanks to an
environment of constant stimulation the biggest challenge these days is
maintaining focus.
"Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article
used to be easy," wrote Nicolas Carr in an essay entitled "Is Google
Making Us Stupid?"
My mind would get caught up in the narrative
or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long
stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my
concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get
fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel
as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep
reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
Carr wrote an excellent book on the subject, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. If you don't have the time, or attention span, to read the book, you can watch the video.
Reading
and other meditative tasks are best performed in what psychologist
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a "state-of-flow," in which "our focus
narrows, the world seems to drop away, and we become less conscious of
ourselves and more deeply immersed in ideas and language and complex
thoughts," Freeman writes.
Communication tools, however, seem to be working against this state.
In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi writes:
In
today's world we have come to neglect the habit of writing because so
many other media of communication have taken its place. Telephones and
tape recorders, computers and fax machines are more efficient in
conveying news. If the only point to writing were to transmit
information, then it would deserve to become obsolete. But the point of
writing is to create information, not simply to pass it along. In the
past, educated persons used journals and personal correspondence to put
their experiences into words, which allowed them to reflect on what had
happened during the day. The prodigiously detailed letters so many
Victorians wrote are an example of how people created patterns of order
out of the mainly random events impinging on their consciousness. The
kind of material we write in diaries and letters does not exist before
it is written down.
It is the slow, organically growing process of thought involved in writing that lets the ideas emerge in the first place.
In The Tyranny of Email, Freeman sums up the multitasking argument:
Multitasking
may not be perfect, but it can push the brain to add new capacity; the
problem, however, remains that the small gains in capacity are
continuously, rapidly, outstripped by the speeding up and growing volume
of incoming demand on our attention.
Why is it so hard to read these days?
In his essay on Google Carr writes:
It
is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense;
indeed there are signs that new forms of "reading" are emerging as users
"power browse" horizontally through titles, contents pages and
abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to
avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Some of this is due to
changes in the medium itself. Newspaper articles are shorter and
catchier. Text has become bigger. We're becoming a PowerPoint culture.
We need bullet points, short sentences, and fancy graphics. We skim
rather than read. Online readers are "selfish, lazy, and ruthless," said
Jakob Nielson, a usability engineer. If we don't get what we want, as
soon as we want it, we move to the next site.
But all of this has a cost.
"What
we are losing in this country, and presumably around the world is the
sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading," said Dana
Gioia, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. "I
would believe people who tell me that the internet develops reading if I
did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading
comprehension on virtually all tests."
"If the research on multitasking is any guide," Freeman writes in the The Tyranny of Email,
"and if several centuries of liberal arts education have proven
anything, the ability to think clearly and critically and develop an
argument comes from reading in a focused manner."
These skills
are important because they enable employees to step back from an
atmosphere of frenzy and make sense in a busy, nearly chaotic
environment. If all companies want, though, is worker bees who will
simply type till they drop and badger one another into a state of
overload, a new generation of inveterate multitaskaholics might be just
what they get. If that's the case, workplace productivity isn't the only
thing that will suffer.
Freeman concludes his book by offering several tips you can do to
take back control of your life and the mental space email is consuming.
1. Don't send
The
most important thing you can do to improve the state of your inbox,
free up your attention span, and break free of the tyranny of email is
not to send an email. As most people now know, email only creates more
email, so by stepping away from the messaging treadmill, even if for a
moment every day, you instantly dial down the speed of the email
messagopolis.
2. Don't check it first thing in the morning or late at night
Not
checking your email first thing will also reinforce a boundary between
your work and your private life, which is essential if you want to be
fully present in either place. If you check your email before getting to
work, you will probably begin to worry about work matters before you
actually get there. Checking your e-mail first thing at home doesn't
give you a jump on the workday; it just extends it. Sending email before
and after office hours has a compounded effect, since it creates an
environment in which workers are tacitly expected to check their email
at the same time and squeeze more work out of their tired bodies.
3. Check it twice a day
Checking
your email twice a day will … allow you to set the agenda for your day,
which is essential if you want to stay on task and get things done in a
climate of constant communication.
4. Keep a written to-do list and incorporate email into it
5. Give good email
6. Read the entire incoming email before replying
This
seems like a pretty basic rule, but a great deal of email is generated
by people replying without having properly read initial messages.
7. Don't debate complex or sensitive matters by email
8. If you have to work as a group by email, meet your correspondents face to face
9. Set up your desktop to do something else besides email
As
much as you can, take control over your office space by setting aside
part of your desk for work that isn't done on the computer. Imagine it
as your thinking area, where you can read or take notes or doodle as you
work out a problem.
10. Schedule media-free time
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