Imagine if I explained a new digital messaging product to you by saying “you’re going to be distracted by new messages every 5 mins, you’ll be expected to respond to many messages immediately, and you can receive new messages 24/7, so you’ll need to be checking your messages at home and on the weekend.” You’d probably laugh, hope I wasn’t serious and get on with your day.
Unfortunately everything I described above is the reality that most of us face every day at work. And it’s called email.
Email is everywhere. Heralded as a silver bullet to make communication easier, it has come to symbolise everything that is wrong with our 21st working culture. You know, the one where technology is supposedly working for us, saving us time and energy so we can focus on the important stuff. Like checking out all the 24hr sale items on ASOS.
Emails are easy to send, the barrier to entry is very low. The flip side of this is that the sheer volume of emails sent and received every day is staggering. The average knowledge worker receives 93 emails in their work day. That’s roughly 11 emails an hour. If those emails are received in 5 minute increments, that’s 11 times the recipient has stopped whatever they were doing to open their email and cross their fingers that reading it doesn’t change their day for the worst. This has a tremendous impact on productivity.
Shifting attention from one task to another is called multi-tasking. Supposedly only 2% of the population can effectively multi-task (and they do it so well they’re called super-taskers. They actually get better the more tasks they take on). For the rest of us plebs, shifting between tasks can cost up to 40% of our productive time – that’s 16hrs a week! Much of this lost time is spent getting back into the original task we were working on, which can take up to 20mins.
In addition to robbing us of productive time and diverting our focus, multi-tasking also degrades our clarity and depletes our mental energy. So much so that a UK study found that people distracted by calls, emails and messages lost 10 IQ points that day. Sounds scary doesn’t it? I for one need to retain as many IQ points as possible.
However, all is not lost! Check out our next post 3 tips to manage your inbox for some ideas on how to get those IQ points back.
