Jeff Atwood over at CodingHorror recently posted a very interesting scientific basis for what we’ve all probably long suspected: email is addictive.
In the original article, there is a study on two lab rats. The first rat receives food after a fixed number of lever presses. The second rat receives food after a random number of presses. Fixed delivery vs variable delivery.
Intuition would say that the first setup is more addictive, as the rat with fixed delivery can predict and learn that pressing the lever results in food. As he wants more food, he will keep pressing.
But here’s the rub… as soon as the food stopped being dispensed, it was the second rat that kept pressing the lever for a very long time (whereas the first rat quickly gave up). It was addicted by the promise that food could arrive ‘any time now’.
Unfortunately for us, it’s the second rat who has the most email like experience… Replace ‘food’ with ‘new email’, and ‘lever’ with ‘opening/switching-to Gmail’, and you can most probably relate to the study. Conclusion? Email is a Variable Reinforcement Machine.
The heart of the issue is that, despite complaints about email overload, new email is rewarding. It can randomly deliver interesting news and opportunities from beloved contacts. The Variable Reinforcement Machine theory shows why the random nature of email makes checking for that reward so compulsive (even if the reward only rarely arrives).
The second addictive ‘hit’, the one that completes the cycle, is the reward of replying. It’s perhaps harks back to our school days – an opportunity to please teacher – or just the basic human gratification of helping someone else, that means we take pleasure in imaging how much joy our reply will bring the recipient. And so reply we do. And the act of replying brings in more email, and so the cycle repeats.
The real harm to all this checking is the damage to our attention. The inability to easily return our focus back to what we were doing before we checked. (In GTD terms, it’s a “context shift”, and that’s mentally expensive). That’s where the addiction truly hurts us.
The question that’s most interesting to our group is, do you control how often you check email? And if so, why + how? (Reasons not to limit checking would also be very interesting).
True, true…
…but I must say that it is a definitive before and after, ie before GTD Inbox and after.
Before GTD I had appr 1000 unsorted mails in my inbox and all these loose threads lay in my head. No control at all.
Now I have the same amount of mails neatly sorted outside my head and an empty inbox so at least it gives me a feeling of being in control. It is much more easy now to focus back to what I was doing before I checked because I have tagged the mail and archived it and know where to find it.
I schedule e-mail checks every other hour. I do not use push e-mail, My phone is set for manual downloads. I do not use any desktop notification for new mail. However when I am waiting for something I have a bad habit of leaving a GMail tab open on an available screen.
Actually, the addictive nature of e-mail is what makes such tools as GTD-Inbox, and Gmail itself, so effective. It’s because of the addiction to e-mail that the Gmail tab is my homepage, and is usually open. This allows me to use it as a tool. E.g., I’ve always had trouble using a diary and keeping a proper to-do list. I would just neglect to look the right place up when necessary… Now, since I’m an e-mail addict, and there’s a calendar display on the main Gmail screen (a Labs feature), I suddenly have a habit of looking at my appointments. Quite useful!
Of course, when I have to do things that require long-term concentration (such as writing papers), the addiction creates a problem (so I have an old laptop, with which I can’t connect to the Internet at all, which I use for that sort of stuff.
But on the whole, the whole point of using productivity tools on Gmail is that I’m addicted to it and use it all the time anyway.
Yea – true and I am bad. I have gmail open all the time in a multiple tab setup I use all day long. Certainly I check it at least on the half hour. I do have a notifier on my desktop – maybe should get rid of it. GTDInbox is certainly a help in knowing I haven’t missed anything, which I am a bit anxious about. The previous post of “email as tasks” is absolutely true for me so your addon really helps me feel less out of control of the events and needs.
I send and receive close to 100 emails on many days, and often have someone waiting on my reply before they can proceed with their own work. So, I have two approaches, both based on the concepts of zero inbox and prompt processing of messages as tasks.
When I am in my office or at my laptop, I process email first thing in the morning. This empties my in box. Then whenever a new email appears, I archive if if I don’t need to deal with it immediately, or I interrupt my work and deal with it. Whenever I switch between projects during the work day, I search Gmail for unread messages (the ones I have archived without reading) and process them, so that I process incoming messages several times during the work day, and again at the end.
When I am out of the office or away from the laptop, I do essentially the same thing except that I cannot always completely handle a task that comes in as email. When that happens, I let the person who sent the message that I will respond more fully within a few days, and then I forward the message to my action email address with a note telling me what I need to do. I have a Gmail filter that automatically stars any incoming messages to the action address, so even though I have archived these messages from my mobile, they are easy to find when I get back to my office.
For my own peace of mind and in order to keep the work flow going for myself and for everyone I work with, I find that staying on top of messages rather than letting them build up helps a lot.
I mentioned in an earlier comment that I really want the ability to filter based on whether the sender’s email address is in my contacts or not. I can’t believe Google hasn’t done this yet (despite my numerous pings
Almost all of my most important emails come from people who are in my contact list. I have the good/mis-fortune of being an early adopter, and have been storing my contacts online for over 10 years. (The bad part is that there are nearly 3000, and many are stale).
As a first cut, being able to identify which emails came from people already in my contact list would be a good first-pass for me.
Also, because GMail doesn’t do this, it also creates some false positives on spam. That is, if I delete emails that come from the same person because they are dumb jokes I don’t have time for, over time Google apparently tags this person as spammer and shoves all of their email into the spam box, even though this person is a friend and is in my Gmail Contacts. So, when he finally sends me something important, e.g., his wedding invitation, I’m hosed!
Am I missing something–this seems painfully obvious to me, and critically valuable.
Jim