E-mail Addiction – A good thing???!
New research released at the end of 2008 by Basex indicates that the U.S. economy loses $900 billion per year to information overload – including email addiction. So why does a recent online advice column in the San Francisco Chronicle have readers believing that email addiction is a good thing?
The column, written by David Robinson, says to a reader who worries that he might have an email addiction and asks how to break the habit, “Perhaps you don’t have to. Taking a break once every hour or so while you’re working on a big project is not only natural but probably a good way to keep your level of effort from tapering off.”
This advice is problematic at best. Once you’re disrupted by an email, it takes an average of four minute to get back on track per interruption. Allowing yourself to be lulled into checking your email every time you have a new message is costing you time, and your company money.
This is why we declared this week the second annual international Clean Out Your Inbox Week.
We want people to use Clean Out Your Inbox Week to develop effective and efficient email habits by working as a group and setting up rules for email use. As an example, turning off the automatic send and receive feature and checking your email only five times daily, have helped individuals and companies reclaim hours of productive, billable time – not to mention saving them the stress of worrying about constantly checking their inboxes.
Email is an effective communication tool that we depend on more and more, however, we’ve developed a dependency to email that saps productivity. Lots of people can’t keep up with their Inbox and, since they don’t know how to break these habits, simply declare email bankruptcy. While starting fresh helps in the short term, it does little to change the ineffective habits that got them behind in the first place.
To read the complete San Francisco Chronicle advice column response, visit http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/01/11/JOBSrobinson.DTL
