{"id":108380,"date":"2021-03-02T09:04:42","date_gmt":"2021-03-02T09:04:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/?p=108380"},"modified":"2021-03-02T09:04:42","modified_gmt":"2021-03-02T09:04:42","slug":"opinion-the-scourge-of-work-email-is-far-worse-than-you-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/business\/opinion-the-scourge-of-work-email-is-far-worse-than-you-think\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: The scourge of work email is far worse than you think"},"content":{"rendered":"

OPINION:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Whenever I check my emails, a number appears in the top right-hand corner of my computer screen that used to fill me with a horrible sense of despair.<\/p>\n

It shows how many emails are<\/span> in my inbox and as I type, I can see there are many thousands of them. Another number on the top left-hand side shows something that once caused even more misery: the emails that are unread. There are thousands of them too.<\/span><\/p>\n

For a while I did what people tell you to do to deal with a bloated inbox. Set up filters. File stuff to folders. Set aside time to mass delete. But the scale of the digital bilge was overwhelming. So then I did something far more effective. I gave up.<\/p>\n

I have never looked back from the liberating strategy of letting the mess wash in. Yet I was pleased to see one email arrive the other day with news that Cal Newport, a US academic, had written a new book called . It promised to free workers from the tyranny of the inbox and I immediately tracked down a copy.<\/p>\n

Newport has become an authority on smarter ways to work. At 38, the computer science professor has knocked out seven books in the past 16 years, including a 2016 hit, , whose title has become a catchphrase for achieving focus in a frantically distracted world.<\/p>\n

He also has a podcast, a blog, a newsletter and three sons under the age of nine. He typically does not work past 5.30pm on weeknights and keeps most of his weekends free.<\/p>\n

I am guessing he knows how to work productively. Whether he knows how to end the scourge of too much email is another thing.<\/p>\n

What I like best about his book is that it shows the email problem is far worse than thought. What might have been a mild nuisance 10 years ago has turned into a serious productivity sap.<\/p>\n

The average worker now sends and receives about 126 business emails a day, Newport reports, and a lot of white-collar workers devote more than three hours a day to the Sisyphean task of dealing with them.<\/p>\n

They do this knowing many messages are irrelevant and few require instant answers. Why? In part because our ancient brains are hard-wired to fret about ignoring social obligations. That made evolutionary sense when we lived in interdependent tribes. Today, it explains the distress that erupts at the sight of a screen of unanswered emails.<\/p>\n

The trouble is, email is so cheap and easy that it has given rise to what Newport calls the “hyperactive hive mind” \u2014 a new way of office working that revolves around an ongoing conversation of unscheduled messages.<\/p>\n

Email and its more fevered cousin, Slack, no longer simply interrupt important tasks. They fuel an endless, attention-draining digital discussion about those tasks that we have come to regard as both normal and unavoidable.<\/p>\n

In other words, the scourge of email is part of a wider, systemic problem that cannot be solved with one-off productivity “hacks”, such as writing better subject headings or using Gmail’s autocomplete function.<\/p>\n

It requires a much bigger structural overhaul, akin to the way Henry Ford revolutionised carmaking with the assembly line.<\/p>\n

This is, I think, a profound insight. I am less convinced by some of Newport’s ideas for what can be done about it. That is partly because organisations differ so much that there are few one-size-fits-all answers. Also, some of his suggested solutions require online project management tools such as Trello that drive more focused work on specific tasks.\u00a0For a computer scientist like Newport they may be more familiar than they are to others.<\/p>\n

Many firms would balk at testing some of his other ideas \u2014 set hours when a worker cannot be interrupted; hiring an “attention capital ombudsman”; supercharging administrative support in workplaces.<\/p>\n

Such changes, Newport admits, can be “a pain in the short term”, though he is confident the long-term productivity gains are worth it. I think he is right.<\/p>\n

One day, a new Henry Ford will be rewarded for fixing the imperfect working world that was unwittingly forged through tech breakthroughs such as email. Meanwhile, Newport has defined the scale of a problem too few of us knew existed.<\/p>\n

Written by: Pilita Clark<\/p>\n

\u00a9 Financial Times<\/strong><\/p>\n

Source: Read Full Article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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