Observing Email (or Facebook or Texting . . .)
My favorite part of this exercise was the level of attention I was giving to my habits. Before paying attention this week, I never really knew what I was doing. I have often described the experience of bouncing mindlessly along the Internet as an “Internet blackout.” Thankfully, instead of waking up on a dirty sidewalk with no shoes or money in Las Vegas, I just “wake up” somewhere out there on the Internet. I’ll find myself looking at animated gifs of Beyoncé at the Super Bowl, and have no idea how I got there. . . . I am sure that paying attention to my habits is the first step to helping me focus when I need to, and to resist the (deliciously) tempting distractions of the Internet.
—Emily
If I took a second to ask myself, “Why am I checking my email right now?” I would save myself a lot of unnecessary stress and annoyance.
—Vivian
Imagine sending letters at the speed of light. Well into the twentieth century, such a feat was physically impossible, and best left to science fiction to envision. It had taken hundreds of years to create efficient national and transnational postal systems. The best of them could deliver the mail quickly and efficiently. In London in the late nineteenth century, there were multiple pickups and deliveries each day, and it was possible to send a letter and receive a reply the same day. The telegraph, an early-nineteenth-century invention, did in fact allow coded messages to be sent at light speed, but telegrams were costly and usually brief, and you had to go to a centralized place to send and receive them.
So email, invented roughly fifty years ago, was clearly a remarkable step forward. Strictly speaking, email wasn’t a digital letter (it didn’t exactly look like one or behave like one), and its immediate predecessor wasn’t actually the letter. Rather, email copied features of the office memo (short for memorandum), which was invented around the turn of the twentieth century as a shortened form of the business letter. In the memo, fields like To, From, and Subject were meant to speed up the delivery and comprehension of office communications, in part by eliminating the flowery openings and closings—such as “yours very truly”—that were the norm in letter writing at the time.1
This trend toward abbreviated writing and faster delivery has of course continued since email appeared on the scene. Now we have instant messaging, texting, Twitter, and the like, and these communicative forms can be composed and accessed not only on our personal computers but on our mobile devices. So email is no longer the only means of digital letter writing, as it was for at least the first twenty years of its existence. Nor is it the coolest, the most cutting-edge, as young people have opted for more recently invented modes not yet colonized by their parents and grandparents.
Despite this growing range of choices, email remains a vital communication tool, both for business and for personal exchange. In 2014, there were four billion email accounts worldwide, with the number expected to exceed five billion by the end of 2018. More than 200 billion email messages are now sent every day, roughly 55 percent of which are business oriented. Workers spend a considerable amount of their work time managing email, with estimates as high as 50 percent. And while the use of social media for personal communication is growing rapidly, the amount of email sent for personal exchange is still considerable: nearly 90 billion messages in 2015.2
It isn’t hard to see why email persists. We use it so extensively, especially in the workplace, because it is the common coin of the realm, because we have a great deal of facility with it that comes from many years of experience, and because it works. Yet at the same time, many of us have an uneasy relationship with this form of communication, recognizing it as a source of frustration, stress, overload, and overwork. (“Though it is tremendously useful and will never die,” says Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times, “email is also, for many people, completely annoying.”)3 Those email messages just keep coming, day and night, announcing upcoming events, inquiring about tasks not yet completed, adding to conversational threads that never seem to end. I’ve noticed over the years that just catching sight of my email inbox is enough to stress me out.
What exactly is the problem with email? Is it that we receive too many messages to cope with? That we don’t have the right management strategy for sorting, responding to, and archiving the wealth of messages we receive? Could the problem be with our particular email client, or our failure to properly understand and use its more advanced features, such as filtering? A little searching online will turn up all these diagnoses and more. Just try doing a search on “email overload” and you will come upon all manner of tools and techniques to help you address some version of the problem.
While many of these tools and techniques are, or can be, quite useful, adopting them unreflectively puts the cart before the horse—or, more precisely, the treatment before the diagnosis. Surely, there is no single right way to solve everyone’s email problems. We are all different: our jobs are different, our cognitive capacities are different, and so is our emotional makeup. But if we pay more attention to what happens when we use email and how it makes us feel, we will have more of a basis for diagnosing the problem, our problem, and for doing something about it.
In my classes, the first exercise I assign is the email observation exercise, and I present the exercise to my students much as I am about to do here. I choose email over, say, Facebook, Twitter, or some other social media application both because it remains a significant part of our collective lives and because it is the only communication tool that everyone in the class is guaranteed to use. Young students, who mainly use other media for personal communication, must have and use email accounts, since official university life depends upon it. Besides, once they enter the workforce, they will discover how important email remains. And older, returning students or working professionals are totally immersed in email, and many express frustration with it.
But you needn’t select email as your object of study in this first exercise. You are free to choose Facebook or Twitter or texting, or any other single application. It should be straightforward to substitute Facebook (say), for email, and to make the other changes this substitution requires. But if you are doing this exercise with others, I strongly recommend that you all choose the same application, so you can easily compare notes with one another.
Overview of the Email Observation Exercise
Each of us handles email somewhat differently. Some of us check email on our computers, while others of us mainly use our phones. Still others use a combination of devices. Some of us have email open and available all day long, reading and responding to messages as soon as they arrive, while others restrict themselves to a limited number of email sessions per day. Some of us maintain separate accounts for business, family, and friends, while others funnel all their mail through one primary account. This exercise asks you to pay attention to your current email strategy: to the habits that you’ve formed, whether consciously or unconsciously, around how you read and write email messages, and around how you manage your inbox.
But the exercise also asks you to notice how you feel when you perform these operations. What emotions arise when you first catch sight of your inbox, or when you see certain messages there? What effects do these emotions have on you (on your body posture, on your breathing, on your thinking)? What do these reactions lead you to do? And how effective are these habitual ways of reacting, when you honestly reflect on them? Might you make other choices—develop a somewhat different strategy for handling email—once you begin to see your current habits?
. . .
Box 4.1: The Email Observation Exercise
What to do
Use email as you normally do, paying attention both to the email activities you are performing and to what you are experiencing in your mind and body as you perform them. Use this information to notice your habitual patterns of behavior, what motivates them, and how these patterns affect your effectiveness and well-being. Make changes, based on your discoveries, and formulate them as personal guidelines.
Why do it?
• To practice (and strengthen) your ability to observe yourself.
• To use the information gathered from self-observation to improve your email craft.
. . .
Few of us, of course, tend to bring this level of self-observation and awareness to our online activity. We get into a kind of doing mode, where we’re mainly focused on results, on what we’re trying to make happen next. When there are gaps in this stream of activity, because we’re waiting for a system or a person to respond, we’ll often switch to another task and continue doing something else. Or we’ll wait impatiently and distractedly for a response. We’re generally not very present to what we’re feeling or experiencing in the moment. But now, in this first exercise, you will be able to see that the mind and body provide a vantage point, an observation station, from which to observe and reflect upon the character and quality of your online activities, and that this kind of seeing can lead to insights that will enhance what you do.
How to Do the Email Observation Exercise
Box 4.2 summarizes the six steps in the exercise, as I introduced them in Chapter 2. Let’s work through each of them in turn.
Step 1: Perform the primary practice (do email)
The heart of the exercise is simple and straightforward: just do your email. For twenty minutes or half an hour, pay attention to your inbox (or to multiple inboxes, if you prefer). Scan your inbox. Open and read messages. Reply to some of them. Compose new messages. Do exactly what you would normally do at this time and place. Do this “primary practice” once a day for several days, or preferably for an entire week.
As you perform these activities, I ask you just to pay attention to your email. But I realize that not everyone normally works with their email as a solo activity. Some of us prefer to multitask when we use email, switching between email and other apps. And some of us don’t even think of email as a discrete activity (we don’t do email in “sessions”). If these descriptions apply to you, you have two choices: For the period devoted to this exercise, you can limit yourself just to email, artificial though this may feel. Or, you can maintain your normal multitasking behavior, but focus your attention primarily on your email.
. . .
Box 4.2: The Steps of the Email Observation Exercise
Step 1: Perform the primary practice (do email)
Conduct one or more email sessions as you normally would do.
Step 2: Observe what you are doing and feeling
Pay attention both to the email activities you are performing (reading and writing email messages, scanning your inbox, etc.) and to what you are feeling (what is happening in or to your breath and body, your thoughts and emotions, your attentional focus) as you perform these activities.
Step 3: Log what you are observing
Keep a running record of what you observe in Step 2.
Step 4: Consolidate (summarize) your observations
Review your log, looking for larger patterns. How do you habitually react to certain email events? How effective are these patterns?
Step 5: Formulate personal guidelines
What do these patterns suggest about how to use email in healthier and more effective ways?
Step 6: Share and discuss
Talk with others about what you’ve been discovering.
. . .
Step 2: Observe what you are doing and feeling
While you are using email, you should also pay attention to what you are experiencing as you use it. The mindful check-in (first described in Chapter 3 and more fully explained in Appendix A) guides you to notice what is happening in your mind and body—the quality of your attention, your emotional state, the state of your breath and body—while you are on email. Observing in this way will give you the chance to identify bottlenecks, points of constriction, in your email practice, as well as places where your efforts are easy and free-flowing. Identifying such places allows you to ask, “What is going on here? What does this tell me about the way I currently use email?”
Step 3: Log what you are observing
This next step consists in logging (taking notes on) what you have been observing, as preparation for step 4, where you will be consolidating and summarizing what you’ve observed. I suggest that you maintain a written log, either digitally or on paper, where you jot down observations as they arise—or shortly after the primary practice is over, if you prefer. (Appendix B gives you a possible format for your log.)
So what exactly should you record? I suggest that you note the date and time you began observing and the time you stopped. You might also note the current environment in which you’re performing the exercise. (Are you at home, on the bus, sitting in a noisy coffee house?) Then you will want to note specifically what was happening and how it made you feel. Are you suddenly aware that you’ve been holding your breath? What were you doing at that moment, and what does this tell you? Do you now notice that you feel relaxed and content? How is this related to what you’ve just been doing or thinking?
These are all the instructions I generally offer about logging in my course. In practice, I find that students log whatever is most salient and at whatever level of detail is most useful to them. But to give you a feeling for the range of possible log entries, here are three actual entries written by my students:
Breathing . . . wow, I’m just about holding my breath just looking at the inbox tab. Body is a bit strained, stiff, head a little forward, arms are tight, not relaxed at all; my knees are tightly crossed and my lower back is a bit achy. Mood: resentful as though I don’t have a choice whether to check email or not, feels like an interruption to other projects that are more to my liking.
—Holly
My body and mind were all over the place during this email session. . . . I opened my laptop to an inbox of fifteen emails, all of which seemed important. As I scanned the list for signs of junk or easy answers, I resolved those few, then decided to get up and go get some water. I came back and decided to read each email and turn it into a to-do on my list next to the computer. I started to notice my fatigue from working out over the weekend, and spent most of the reading time leaning on one elbow. When I moved it out of the way to start responding, I felt more awake because I was sitting up, but it was a challenge to combat the muscle soreness. However, the challenges I was dealing with in my emails overtook my physical awareness and I only noticed my fatigue when I finally stood up to go to a meeting.
—Barry
On computer, on couch, leaned forward (just head, back leaned back). Listening to roommate talk . . . absentmindedly opening email, seeing nothing new, closing it and then opening again out of habit . . . little or no engagement. Hardly even realizing what I’m doing!
—Doug
Step 4: Consolidate (summarize) your observations
Now read through your notes and reflect on them. You might think that this step is unnecessary, but it’s actually quite important. The entries in your log are likely to be fairly raw and terse, and specific to the moment. Looking back over everything you’ve written will give you the chance to notice patterns that may not have been obvious in the moment, and to fill out your understanding by comparing and contrasting multiple observations. Are there times when you use email as a distraction from other more important activities? Why do you check email when you do, and how well does this work for you? Does it make a difference whether you are checking email on your computer or on your phone?
This is where paying attention to your immediate experience can really pay off. When your email practice is problematic (whatever that means for you), you may find that you’ve been holding your breath, or collapsing your chest, or feeling anxious or upset. And when your email practice is going well, you may find indications of that in your mind and body—a greater sense of relaxation, a lightness of mood.
I also suggest that you write about the patterns you are discovering. This can serve two useful purposes. First, it can help you clarify your thoughts, as writing and journaling often do. And second, it will give you valuable material to share with others in Step 6 below. Box 4.3 provides some questions to help you organize your thinking and writing.
Step 5: Formulate personal guidelines
The summary remarks that you’ve just created will give you a good sense of what’s currently working well and what isn’t. This understanding provides the basis for making useful changes, which you should now formulate as personal guidelines for future behavior. But let me stress that these guidelines are personal: They are particular to your observations and habits. They don’t need to work for anyone else. What’s more, they are provisional: subject to further change as you discover more about yourself, or as your circumstances change.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of changes you might consider making: to your online practices (to what you do) and to yourself (to how you are). When you see changes you can make that will improve your effectiveness—for example, by reducing the amount of email you have to deal with or by limiting the number of times you check email during the day—then by all means make them. In this instance, you might write a guideline that says “empty my inbox at the end of each day,” or “deal with email no more than three times a day.” (Some people find that techniques like Inbox Zero can be of help, as well as software that limits which apps they can access.)
. . .
Box 4.3: Noticing Patterns in Your Email Behavior
1. What did you do?
How many sessions did you observe? For how long? During these sessions, did you work exclusively on email, or did you interleave other tasks at the same time? Was this your normal mode of behavior?
2. In observing breath, body/posture, emotions, and attention, which of these dimensions of your present experience were most salient?
What did they reveal to you about how you currently use email (about what’s working well and what isn’t)? Did you notice any of these aspects of your mind and body changing over the course of a session? In what ways and on what basis?
3. Were you able to notice the impulse to check email?
What was going on in your mind and body at that moment? What does this tell you about when and why you check email?
4. Were you able to notice the state of your mind and body when you first laid eyes on your inbox?
What does this tell you?
5. While you were using email, did you notice the impulse to switch to some other task?
Did you switch (sometimes, always, never)? What does this suggest about your current online behaviors/habits?
6. Summarize what you learned from the exercise
Talk with others about what you’ve been discovering.
. . .
But if you find that you can’t change the external conditions—because, for example, your job requires you to be online and continuously handling a torrent of email messages—you still have the possibility of changing the way you deal with these circumstances inside yourself. Thus noticing the resistance you feel to handling all this email and how it affects your body and your emotions, you might decide to reduce your stress by acknowledging what you’re feeling and making a conscious effort to relax in the face of the torrent.
And while you’re carefully noticing constrictions and bottlenecks in your current practice, don’t ignore those aspects that are currently working well. Those times when you are relaxed, attentive, and effective—when your actions are easy and free-flowing—can also be a source of useful information and guidance. One of my students, a doctoral student named Jonathan, was surprised to see how good email actually made him feel, and while many of his classmates were deciding to limit their use of it, he realized that he needed to maintain his current level of use, and possibly even increase it.
At this point, you will have three written sources of insight: a log of your observations, a consolidation of your log entries that summarizes your main discoveries, and a set of personal guidelines that express the changes you intend to make. In this final step, I strongly urge you to share with others what you’ve been learning, showing them your summary and guidelines and discussing the discoveries contained in them.
This kind of sharing is an essential element in my classes and workshops. And it is something the students greatly enjoy. It gives people the chance to compare their experiences with those of others, and to learn about patterns of behavior that they themselves may want to investigate. It also reveals the diversity in their online practices, and illustrates, in a visceral and concrete way, that no single set of rules will ever work for everyone. The back-and-forth discussion that’s provoked by these conversations becomes an additional source of clarification and learning.
If you are reading this book with others, as part of a workplace study group or a community reading group, I urge you to exchange your written remarks with one another and to take the time to discuss them. And if you are doing the exercises alone, I still suggest you find a way to share your insights with others. (You might blog about them, for example.) But if you are determined not to write up what you have been learning, consider having a conversation with a friend or a coworker, even if he or she hasn’t done the exercise. Your discussion with an interested listener will further your own thinking, and it may stimulate your dialogue partner to undertake the exercise for him- or herself.
Now that you’ve performed the email observation exercise (or at least read through it), I want to give you a feeling for the kinds of discoveries that other people make.
The Emotional Dimension of Email
One of the first and most common discoveries is that email is a very emotional business. On the face of it, this may not seem like much of an insight. Most of us already know that we have strong reactions to email. Indeed, many of us express some level of frustration with it. But in paying greater attention to their moment-to-moment experience, people regularly express surprise at the depth and extent of their emotional reactions. Often they characterize these reactions in highly negative terms, using words like “anxiety,” “dissatisfaction,” “dread,” “worry,” and “repulsion.” But not all reports are negative: people also notice depths of positive emotion that they weren’t previously aware of, including the satisfaction of completing something or the joy of being in touch with loved ones.
In my experience, however, negative emotions do seem to predominate. It isn’t hard to understand why. The amount of email we have to deal with, the fact that it’s never ending and we rarely feel caught up—these can obviously trigger bad feelings. Then too, specific email messages may provoke strong emotions, some because they involve deliverables and deadlines, others because they are expressions of other people’s bad moods, or because they come from people with whom we have complex relationships. If you look closely, you may notice that every message (and the task it’s associated with) carries a certain emotional charge. And as a result, simply scanning a couple of vertical inches of your inbox may give you a case of emotional whiplash. Will, a middle-aged manager, has described this as “getting flipped back and forth between twenty thoughts.” “It’s not a great experience,” he adds.
Why is it useful to see the strong emotional dimension of our email use? For one thing, just seeing it clearly can stimulate us to do something about it, even before we know what that might entail. But beyond just showing us the extent of the problem, noticing strong emotions can point us to specific pressure points and bottlenecks. And this can lead us to make specific changes that will reduce our bad feelings: If the amount of email in our inbox is a major emotional trigger, then adopting a zero inbox policy may be a good solution. If we discover that reading email just before going to bed is a source of aggravation, making it harder to fall sleep, then maybe we should stop doing it.
One of the most common discoveries is that strong emotions can trigger us to check email more often than is useful or healthy. Sometimes, it’s the hope that we’ll find something special waiting for us, a hope that is rarely fulfilled. As Vivian, an undergraduate, comments, “The reason I feel the need to check my email all the time on my phone is the hope that I will have a new message from one or two people that I would love to hear from. But the fact is that 90+ percent of the time my emails are not of that personal nature. . . . I am always hoping it will be the email I have been waiting for.” Others notice that email is a way to get away from unpleasant feelings, or to procrastinate, as Anne, a master’s student, observes: “I most often feel the urge [to check email] when I would rather be doing something else. The most common time is during work. I use email checking as an excuse to defer the unpleasant and unstimulating task of doing my job.”
Just seeing this behavior and how it controls us can suggest alternative responses. “If I took a second to ask myself, ‘Why am I checking my email right now?’” Vivian wrote, “I would save myself a lot of unnecessary stress and annoyance.” The following guideline, written by Maria, a master’s student in her early twenties, is a fairly typical response to this problem: “Avoid the impulse to check email numerous times a day. Whenever I feel the urge to check email out of the blue, engage in a healthy activity like reading, taking a walk, biking, etc.”
But there isn’t a single right answer to this problem. Someone might decide that frequent email checking out of anxiety or boredom was actually a valuable strategy and simply continue doing it. (Perhaps it does momentarily alleviate your negative state. Or perhaps you simply accept it as one of your little quirks.) This exercise isn’t about following general rules imposed from elsewhere, or adopting a practice because the internalized voice of your mother or your partner tells you that you “should” do it. Rather, it’s about discovering what works for you.
The Importance of Breath and Body
Just as people are surprised by the amount of emotion they’re feeling while they’re using email, they are often surprised at how unaware they were of their bodies. Deborah, a Web developer in her late thirties, noticed that it wasn’t hard for her to tune in to her thoughts and emotions while she was doing email, but paying attention to physical sensations was a different matter. “I generally don’t think that I need my body when I’m composing an email,” she says, realizing how laughable this sounds. “Of course we need our bodies! I think that I’ve become so used to the pain I have in my hands, wrists, neck, shoulders and back that I have learned to desensitize myself so that I might continue working. This is a disturbing realization for me.” This discovery led her to remember the last job she’d had where she had more physical mobility, when she worked as a waitress. Certainly it had its problems, but “the variety of movement resulted in more energy overall.” And thus she resolved to integrate more movement into her daily routine, including standing, short walks, and stretching.
Some come to see how important the breath is, both as a diagnostic tool and as a means of improving their relationship with email. “In reviewing my email observations,” says Kathy, a mother of two adult children, “it’s clear that I suffer from stress virtually each and every time I open my email. . . . When I am stressed, I hold my breath or breathe in a shallow way.” Having seen this, she realizes what she needs to do. “If I change nothing else, I think it’s important that I unlearn this reflex. Breathing more deeply creates calm and eases anxiety.” And Nichola, an undergraduate planning to work in the tech industry, comes to a similar understanding, expressing it as a personal guideline: “Take five deep breaths before opening my inbox. This will help me to check in with my body and hopefully become more aware of how my inner state affects how I see the world (and email).”
Paying Attention to Attention
When asked to observe their attention, some people notice how distracted they typically are. “When checking email,” Maria comments, “I notice many voices and images in my head. I think about assignments due, meals I need to cook, people I need to call and meet up with, bills I need to pay, and the pain of my recent break-up.” And Krista, who works in an art gallery, notes that email takes her out of the present moment. “While I am doing it, I feel neither alert nor relaxed. I lose all sense of time, physicality, and emotions. It is only after I finish email, that I come to my senses.”
Others, however, discover and are surprised by how attentive they actually are: “The quality of my attention to my email is very high,” says Ashley, who is working toward a graduate library degree. “When I am actively reading or responding to messages, I am perhaps the most intensely focused of any activity throughout my whole day. I am more able to shut out distractions while doing email than while reading or engaged in conversation.”
Still others notice that the quality of their attention varies considerably, depending on a variety of factors. Some are more attentive when they’re using email on their computer, while others find that their focus is stronger when they’re using their smart phone. Some find that their depth of concentration varies with the type of message they are dealing with. Others notice that their degree of concentration depends on the time of day. One woman, a computer consultant named Heather, came to see that she was much more focused, and therefore more effective, while doing email in the morning. “In the morning,” she noted, “I am taking a purposeful swim in my inbox, getting a couple good healthy laps in. In the afternoon, I am being pushed in the pool with my clothes on.”
Having seen when they are at times more and less attentive, and having observed how their quality of attention supports or obstructs their goals, people are then in a position to make changes. Having noticed “many voices and images in my head,” Maria decided that it really mattered to her to be more focused. “This email exercise has taught me how cluttered my mind is and how it really disables me from truly being present with the task at hand.” And she committed to treating email “like meditation,” as an activity in which she could cultivate and practice a deeper form of concentration. (We will explore this possibility further in the next chapter.)
And Heather, who found herself pushed into the pool during her afternoon email sessions, decided to make two changes. One was to see if she could modify her afternoon behavior to learn from, and to mimic, her morning behavior. The other was to reserve her morning time for the email activities that required the greatest focus. She wrote a personal guideline that read: “Consistently use your morning session, that time when you are most calm and organized, to clear and label your inbox. Resolve any messages that you can immediately so they don’t sit around and cause undue stress or anxiety.”
Our Overall Relationship with Email
As these examples show, the email observation exercise can help us observe and make changes to specific behaviors. But it can also reveal aspects of our overall relationship to email: What is our basic attitude toward email? How do we treat it, and how does it treat us?
Ashley talks about her inbox as a being she has a real relationship with: “Emotionally, I feel a kind of responsibility to my email inbox, as if it requires tending to survive and remain vital, like a plant that needs water or a relationship that needs time and attention. I also go to it with emotional expectations: to be distracted, redirected, renewed; to reward myself for doing something else that required a lot of focus or was tedious; to remind myself of who I am in some way; to feel in touch with others; to feel needed and valued; or to feel in control of my time.”
Others describe their relationship with email in more negative terms. Holly, who works at a community college, discovered that she feels like “a dog being wagged by its email tail. Until actually keeping a log and then analyzing it, I was mostly unaware or unconscious of just how much my email controls and affects me both mentally and physically. It’s as though my email is there every day, lurking in the corners of my mind and whispering, ‘You know you’ll have to check me sooner or later—you’ll have to stop whatever it is that you’re doing and deal with me, your inbox.’ I was aware of my consistent reluctance to check email, but never actually looked into why that is or how to fix it.”
If this is how you view your email, then no wonder it’s so stressful. The first step in changing our relationship is recognizing it for what it is. All of these people were able to see how their uncomfortable relationship with email was coloring their uses of it—how it was allowing email to control them. And all of them were then able to rethink and rework their uses of email in concrete ways to establish a more congenial relationship. Lydia, a graphic artist, reports that “email is not the enemy. It is just the messenger that reminds you about your enemy: Stop being afraid that the inbox is a 24/7 scroll of bad news. It is not. There are plenty of emails that are helpful, instructional, positive, and some are full of love. For two weeks, I have programmed pleasant emails to arrive in my inbox from another account.”
But some people conclude that email itself isn’t actually the problem at all. Rick, retired from a government job, realized that his problems with email “are life problems, the ones that predate computers, the ones that are part of being a human being. They are the problems I have with people or situations or my own perceptions of myself and the world. The emails that create stress or unpleasant feelings are the ones that deal with my obligations to others or myself. I could delete all of my email accounts and these problems will still be there.”
For such people, in other words, what matters most isn’t their relationship with email, but the relationships they cultivate through email. This suggests that we pay attention to our deeper intentions when we’re using email. What is the quality of the relationships we want to cultivate?
Final Reflections
Rick’s observation points to the fact that email is actually more than email. For email is a medium of communication, a major instrument for managing our tasks and relationships. And this means that many of the problems we associate with it come from the challenging nature of our lives: figuring out how to work and play well with others, how to manage the unavoidable stresses of living a human life. And what this means is that not all our email problems can be addressed alone, or by making adjustments to the technology. Some changes will require social intervention—for example, by establishing new norms or social agreements within our work group, among our family members, or within our network of friends. And some changes may need to be made at a societal level—in the way we think about work and play, about time together and time apart.
In a 2010 journal article entitled “Email as a Source and Symbol of Stress,” Stephen R. Barley, a professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, and two colleagues report on a study of email use they conducted at a major high tech corporation. They were interested in understanding how the various communication technologies employees use affected their level of stress. And so they collected data on the way employees communicated in face-to-face meetings, email sessions, voicemail sessions, phone calls and teleconferences, instant messaging, and so on. They discovered, of course, that all these communication modes were stressful in a variety of ways.
But they also discovered that email was different in one significant and intriguing way: Email was the mode that people complained about the most. In trying to understand why, they concluded that email was the most visible sign of people’s sense of overwork. Whereas a teleconference or a face-to-face meeting had a beginning and an end, everyone knew that email was always on, and even when they were sleeping new email was accumulating in their inboxes. If they wanted to see, literally and figuratively, the demands of their jobs, they had only to look at their inboxes. This suggested to Barley and his collaborators that email wasn’t the problem—or, more accurately, that it was only part of the problem. For email was in fact more than email—it was the most visible symbol of people’s endless work and therefore an easy scapegoat for their complaints.
To the extent that we fail to understand this, Barley and his colleagues conclude, “employees and organizations are unlikely to recognize and address the larger problem: new patterns of work that crowd days and create unrealistic expectations about response time. To the degree that email’s symbolic force diverts attention from the stress created by the demands being placed on a downsized and globalized workforce, it serves as a red herring.” While I believe this is right, I am convinced that each of us can, and should, bring greater balance to our own individual practice.