It is not the interruption itself, which might be intermittent and very brief that is the issue. Nor is it the method of delivery. The problem is the recovery time. It can take an extraordinary amount of time to get back the train of thought we had before the interruption occurred. Sometimes, a crucial aspect of the thought process might even be forgotten and lost forever.
Typically it will take 10-20 times the length of the interruption before we can refocus (and that is if we are not interrupted again! If we are, the process of refocus is repeated in the length of time in tow). For example, a 30 second interruption will take 5-10 minutes to recover from. This accumulates quite alarmingly over the period of a day. The information we receive during these interruptions are often very relevant but it is the timing of its arrival (if we do not control it) that causes the damage. If we are already working on a higher priority task when it arrives, it has a strong negative impact.
A common result is pseudo ADD, a term coined by two Harvard psychology professors to explain addiction to the bombardment of information. They noticed that many people are experiencing shortened attention span because of the forms of communications used today. This has a sustained negative neurological effect as well. “It is not an illness; it is purely a response to the hyper-kinetic environment in which we live.” The above statement is credited to Stuart Snooks, a renowned productivity expert from Australia.
The distraction we experience today does not just stem from emails alone but also from SMS, Social Media, IM Chats and a host of others. However, today’s piece will focus on email alone but I’d like to point out that it is important that you regulate how you engage new technology in general. We live in a day and age where the average person, no matter what field of life they are in, spend a better part of their day on the Internet. A number of our regular routine tasks such as business transactions, social networking, communication, banking, shopping, etc, have gone digital which of course is a good thing but it has also resulted in some serious confusion inside our inbox. I once saw an email inbox that had 35,000+ unread emails and I was a bit sad for the owner because if that is his primary email then he can easily become susceptible to low productivity and information overload. Paul Chin, said in his online journal ‘Dealing with information overload’: “Rampant multi-tasking and the deluge of available information has produced a counter-productive culture and created a paradox. The more we try to do, the less we get done. And the more inundated we are with information, the less time we spend absorbing it.”
Cleaning up a cluttered inbox is a mind boggling and time wasting task that nobody should look forward to. Avoiding this situation is just the way to go. This brings to mind the quote “prevention is better than cure.” Go carry out your research, it is much better to have a clutter free inbox than an email address with thousands of unread emails. This in my opinion does not help you psychologically as well. If your email inbox is clutter free, you will like not miss any important email within the confusion, you will be able to get back with replies faster and have the simple pleasure of seeing an organised inbox at the end of the day.
Let me share a bit of my email workload with you so you can understand where I am coming from; before now I used to receive an average of 1,000+ emails per day, out of which 80% falls within the unimportant emails category and just about 15-20% are worth consideration. Even at that it remained a herculean task to reply to all 20% not to mention the 80% unimportant ones. So the question is how have I been able to maintain a clutter free email inbox? I wish I could show you a screenshot of my main email account to prove this point.
The 1st strategy I used to take back control of my inbox is the separation of my email accounts; I created more than one account using each of them for different purposes. One is dedicated for important emails; another is for social media and newsletters and so on. This has been a very helpful strategy that has worked well for me in the last 4 years. I also turned off some notifications from social media sites because most of the time, you get distracted by information that adds no value. Why do you have to know about every single update on each of these websites? Again it is certainly not a productive use of your time. The newly re-designed gmail inbox features makes it easier to manage these notifications but I still choose to have most of them turned off.
Have you ever heard of the term “bacn” pronounced bacon? It’s a technical term used to refer to emails that aren’t really spam because you actually subscribed to them, but such emails do not get read often because they are considered not so important. How often does this happen to you, that you get daily emails from a site that you don’t even remember visiting? It happens to me always and this is because we sometimes subscribe in excitement of the information we are consuming at that particular point in time and this explains the reason why our inboxes get clogged. The solution to this; if you know you still want to keep receiving those emails, then you may need subscribe to a service like unroll.me. This will channel all of those kinds of emails to the cloud and then you can read them at your convenience but most importantly, it helps you maintain a healthy email inbox.
Creating a specific time to respond to my emails instead of replying to every single email that comes in has also been an effective strategy. The time you set actually depends on your work or schedule; you could try checking your inbox every one hour or whatever you believe would work for you. Quite a number of people believe that checking and responding to emails as they arrive is the best way to get to an empty inbox but that may not be entirely correct because the statement by Steuart Snooks states that “a 30 second interruption will take 5-10 minutes to recover from. This accumulates quite alarmingly over the period of a day.” So there is a possibility that each time you switch back and forth; you are allowing technology dictate your day and the reverse should be the case. I strongly recommend that you should designate a time that is dedicated solely for the purpose of reading and replying to emails and also turn off the beep that informs you of every new email and keeps you constantly distracted. This process will help you not to lag behind and yet will not even interfere with your work. Another important reason why you should do away with the habit of responding immediately to mails is that it may set an unrealistic expectation in the minds of the recipients that you always reply to your emails immediately and anytime you fail to do that it might bring about issues.
The use of folders also makes a lot of sense. Learn to use email folders and labels to organise your inbox. In my case, I have a folder for different subjects such as Banking, Business, Friends, Extended network etc. the list goes on and on - you can create a label for just about any group. One of the strategies I employ is that I could create a label that gets forwarded to another email, for example, if I want my assistant to respond to emails coming from a particular customer, I would create a label that automatically forwards all emails from that customer to my assistant and I have the option to choose to either keep the message as read, unread, archived or even deleted.
Finally, let me state that in addition to the strategies mentioned above, I also manage my email accounts with a tool know as sanebox - I will talk more about it in the tool of the week section. For those who have been following this column, you know I am big on tools and the simple reason is that the Internet is getting busier by the day and you need these tools to make the most of it. What is most true is that most of these tools are results of one or more entrepreneurs getting together to solve a problem, so each one is a solution to a particular problem. Sanebox is honestly a good solution to email overload.
... Making SENSE of digital revolution!
No comments:
Post a Comment