The bigger point here isn’t really about email in particular it’s about the ever greater “boundarylessness” of work. Not least because people in lower-status roles will feel a continued pressure to reply to everything (and rapidly) long after those in higher-status roles have stopped trying. ![]() Until there’s a consensus on which platform to use for what, though – and on when a lack of response is or isn’t acceptable – you can be sure that ignored emails will be the cause of plenty of misunderstandings and bad feelings. Whereupon we’ll need yet another solution, which I can’t yet perceive, though I have a nauseating feeling that it will somehow involve that terrible guy from Uber getting even richer. Some of which will then themselves get as overwhelmed as our inboxes, or alternatively ignored. But what will happen as volume makes that unfeasible for ever more people? Eventually, I suppose, the system will self-correct we’ll send fewer and fewer personal emails and use alternative platforms for specific purposes – Facebook for birthday greetings, texts to arrange meetings, Twitter instead of office water-cooler chat. Still, the social norm persists: if you email me as an individual, I aim to reply if I email you – and you’re not a celebrity, or someone else I’d expect to be abnormally overwhelmed by messages – I’ll be awaiting your response. (And who influences the algorithm? Couldn’t Starbucks just pay Google to prioritize those messages in which friends suggest we meet for coffee there?) Presumably, the endpoint is that email comes to resemble Facebook, where there’s never a guarantee that you’ll see something a friend posts, if the algorithm doesn’t think you should. In practice, of course, there are countless emails I don’t reply to: thousands of spam messages I never even see hundreds of impersonal advertisements and PR email-blasts I ignore plus, I confess, a handful of personal messages that just seem too arduous to engage with.Īnd algorithms are easing the process of ignoring emails: Gmail has been nudging us to focus on certain emails while ignoring others since it launched Priority Inbox its new product, Gmail Inbox, promises to comb messages to extract important meetings and tasks. But I cling to the notion that email’s different: that’s it’s governed, rightly, by a default assumption that every message sent to me, or by me, deserves a reply. If you reply to me on Twitter, but your message scrolls out of sight before I see it, it’s probably gone for good – and I’m afraid I don’t have the bandwidth to feel bad about that. If my backlog of unread magazines gets too big, I happily throw them out. I’m resigned to treating other sources of incoming data as streams. Nobody really expects you to see every item in a stream – and the only way to deal with one sanely is to dip in for a while, deal with whatever looks important, urgent or entertaining, and then to step away and let the stream flow on.Īs an advocate – and still, mostly, a practitioner – of Inbox Zero, this pains me. That metaphor, borrowed from physical in-trays, implies an assumption that everything that enters will be seen, thought about, then replied to as appropriate.īut as email volumes continue to spiral upwards, our inboxes are turning into streams akin to Facebook’s newsfeed. More and more, our inboxes aren’t inboxes at all. But it’s also an approach that’s especially well-suited to how email is changing. The “check it occasionally” approach to email, then, has always been a good idea (provided your job lets you get away with it). When you check email at fixed times, you’re taking control of when it enters your mental world check it whenever a new message comes in, and essentially email’s controlling you. Another is that feelings of autonomy make us happier. One likely answer is that it reduced the high cognitive costs of task-switching: jumping between different kinds of tasks consumes energy and time, so “batching” is just a more efficient use of your limited capacities. ![]() So why did engaging in that activity made people feel better than just checking messages when they came in? ( “Doctor, it hurts when I do that!” “Well don’t do that, then.”) But as the study’s co-author Kostatin Kushlev points out, it’s a bit more intriguing than that: resisting temptations, like checking email, is itself generally an unpleasant and effortful experience. This might seem obvious: do a stressful thing less frequently, and you’ll be less stressed.
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