Recently in E-mail Category

I love Merlin Mann's way of thinking about productivity, the way that we work and our relationship with our working life. This is a great talk that he gave last year about, yes, Time & Attention. Merlin talks about our relationship to email, the usefulness of re-negotiation, and our need to recognise that our time and attention are scarce resources that we should prize more highly.

Well worth a watch.

What is it that makes our inbox such an enticing place that we spend hours there every day? It's a question that fascinates me, mainly because I have such an uncomfortable relationship with email. I get lots of it, am often slow to respond and frequently end up feeling guilty because my email has got the best of me.

Psychologist Susan Weinschenk puts the blame for our obsession on dopamine:

[T]he latest research shows that dopamine causes seeking behavior. Dopamine causes us to want, desire, seek out, and search.

[...]

It's not just about physical needs such as food, or sex, but also about abstract concepts. Dopamine makes us curious about ideas and fuels our searching for information. The latest research shows that it is the opoid system (separate from dopamine) that makes us feel pleasure.

Wanting vs. liking - According to Kent Berridge, these two systems, the "wanting" (dopamine) and the "liking" (opoid) are complementary. The wanting system propels us to action and the liking system makes us feel satisfied and therefore pause our seeking. If our seeking isn't turned off at least for a little while, then we start to run in an endless loop. The latest research shows that the dopamine system is stronger than the opoid system. We seek more than we are satisfied (back to evolution... seeking is more likely to keep us alive than sitting around in a satisfied stupor).

A dopamine induced loop - With the internet, twitter, and texting we now have almost instant gratification of our desire to seek. Want to talk to someone right away? Send a text and they respond in a few seconds. Want to look up some information? Just type it into google. What to see what your friends are up to? Go to twitter or facebook. We get into a dopamine induced loop... dopamine starts us seeking, then we get rewarded for the seeking which makes us seek more. It becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, stop checking our cell phones to see if we have a message or a new text.

This sheds much needed light on why we spend so much time checking for new email only to then not deal with it when it has arrived, but there is more to the email problem than dopamine.

There are cultural problems around the use of email as a proxy for productivity; huge email loads being worn as a badge of honour by people who like to equate their inbox martyrdom with a commitment to work; and defensive emailing by people who feel so scared or insecure that they CC everyone. These issues around the sending of mail need to be tackled, probably before we try to tackle our dopamine-fueled inbox obsession.

But as Weinschenk points out, tools like Twitter are just as likely to "send our dopamine system raging".

So if social media is as addictive as email, isn't it pointless to try to replace one with the other? I don't think so, no, because there's more to it than trying to reduce inbox faffing, as important as that is. It's also about improving sharing, findability, archiving, collaboration, conversation, staff relationships, morale and efficiency. These benefits, in my opinion, outweigh the potential flaws in the new tools.

We do need to be aware that social media isn't without its problems, but understanding the fundamental biological and psychological processes that shape the way we interact with technology will help us to solve those problems. I look forward to watching and maybe even participating in the emerging field of technopsychology.

Poor old e-mail, it's taking a right old beating at this conference. In fact, one speaker has given it up entirely. Luis Suarez isn't from a hipster startup, though. He works for IBM. Nine months ago, he decided that e-mail was making everyone else productive but not him. So he decided not to use it any more.

And IBM is a e-mail driven company - and a distributed one. He works for IBM Netherlands, he works from Gran Canaria, and reports to the US. That's a modern business.

There were two reactions from his colleagues:
• You'll be sacked in 2 weeks.
• Finally, somebody with the balls to tell the company to not use e-mail.
Nine months later, he still hasn't been sacked. He's down to 20 to 30 e-mails a week now, mainly calendering e-mails. Instead, he's mainly using social software, to prove the point.

E-mail is locked, private and prone to the power games of the CC and the BCC, he suggests. Social software is more transparent, because most of your activities happen in public, or semi-public spaces.  Suarez wanted to make his working practices more transparent, and that's important in the current situation.

The result? He's more in control of how he works. He no longer fights the corporation on e-mail. He hangs out with his communities, getting the job done. Adoption of social software happens within communities.

"'m more passionate about what I do, because I have a stronger feeling of community," he says.

The 2 to 3 hours a day people spend on e-mail he's spending in social tools with colleagues or customers. With customers, it's Facebook and Twitter, for example.

"You guys need to be the ones challenging [the corporate culture]," he told the Web 2.0 Expo crowd. "Go where your communities are - and work with them. E-mail doesn't give you trust, social tools do. "

E-mail. No-one thinks of it as a social app. It's hardly what we think of as Web 2.0, yet it's the most social piece of software most of us use each day.

Oh, and it's broken.

That, at least, was what Suw Charman-Anderson suggested at one of the keynote sessions of the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin today.

She pointed out that e-mail has gone from something you needed a business case for a decade ago, to the first thing you get in a new job. And that's creating a problem:

• 13% of people are getting more than 250 e-mails per day
• 56% of people think they're spending too long on e-mail.
 
The reality is worse than that, she suggested, because we tend to underestimate our e-mail use.

The fundamental problem is that e-mail alerts interrupt us - there's a cost to that. It takes us 1m 44 secs 64 seconds to get our train of thought back after we deal with e-mail. (The 1m 44s figure is for how long we take to process the alert. Thanks for the correction, Suw) We can't afford to spend a day a week figuring our what we were doing.

Psychologist have a term that describes our relationship with e-mail: operant conditioning - when we check e-mail, sometimes we get a nice one.That starts to create an emotional relationship with checking e-mail.  Scientists explore the idea by feeding rats when they press levers. Rats will press a lever five times, if that's how often it takes to get food. But they get obsessed with lever-pushing when the food reward is random. That's exactly relationship we have with e-mail. We keep checking it, in the hope that an emotionally-boosting one will come through.

Coupled with that, e-mail has become a proxy for work. Web working makes it difficult to judge how productive people are. If send lots of e-mail, clearly they're doing lots of work - or so goes the thinking.

Together, these responses are rapidly eroding our productivity. So what's the solution? You need to thhink about other ways of doing the same tasks - but with different tools.

Document collaboration - doing this via e-mail, and merging it all at the end is one of the most soul-destroying ways of doing it. Using wikis is easier.

Sharing Information - Don't e-mail it. Publishing blogs and make sure everyone uses RSS. There need to be RSS readers for everyone in the company -  a step that is often forgotten.

Short Conversations - use IM and chat for instant communication. E-mail makes conversations go on too long, as everyone feels need to be polite. IM conversations tend to be quick and to-the-point.