Marshall McLuhan, once upon a time a well-known critic of the times, offered this insight about humanity and its tools: "First we build the tools, then they build us."
First mankind created a tool for instant, distant communication, then the email inbox forced us to communicate instantly, distantly, endlessly.
The email inbox fills up rapid-fire: It's the microwave popcorn of timely messaging. As with that popcorn, there's a dread attached to looking away. One survey estimated that a third of U.S. workers reply within 15 minutes of receiving any work email, and three-quarters reply within an hour. Another survey found 183 billion emails are sent and received worldwide every day.
By another account, the average professional spends as many as 13 hours checking email each week -- almost twice the time spent relaxing.
OVERLOAD
Productivity experts and overworked office drones have complained about email overload for years. Tim Ferriss, recently described by The Washington Post as "a self-help virtuoso/obnoxiously perfect human," advised readers of his advice book The Four-Hour Workweek (2007) to free themselves from the distractions of email pretty much all together, checking in with it only for a few minutes in the morning or late afternoon.
And in a much-quoted 2011 manifesto, Chris Anderson, curator of TED Talks (ted.com), described email overload as a tragedy of the commons and proposed a "charter" to encourage people to email less.
But where is the scientific proof that email creates stress? In a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior, Kostadin Kushlev and Elizabeth M. Dunn set out to assess scientifically whether constantly checking one's email really is as taxing as everybody thinks it must be.
EVIDENCE
In a two-week experiment at the University of British Columbia, Kushlev and Dunn found that checking email less often at work made people feel significantly less stressed.
The study sample was small and not diverse -- 124 people with a mean age of 30, two-thirds of them college or graduate students and 67 percent female. (The remaining third came from a range of professions.) These people completed an initial survey that included describing how many times they checked email during a typical workday.
The first Sunday after this survey, participants received -- via email -- instructions on how to handle their email for the following week. The next Sunday, they received a different set of instructions. One week they were randomly assigned to limit checking their email to three times a day. The other week, they could check their email an unlimited number of times per day.
During both weeks, researchers sent participants questionnaires -- via email -- at 5 p.m. daily. These asked a lot of questions about things like how much work they got done, how they slept and how stressed or anxious they felt. For example:
• "Today, how often have you felt that you were unable to control the important things in your life?"
• "Today, how often have you felt nervous and 'stressed'?"
• "Today, how often have you been angered because of things that were outside of your control?"
And the people reported that, by and large, when they checked their email all the time, they felt stressed. When they only checked it three times a day, their stress levels decreased.
In their report, the researchers note that earlier research has shown downstream effects from stress, and so constant email-checking could have subtle consequences far beyond topics of productivity and workplace tension: how people sleep, how they interact with other people, how meaningful and fulfilling everything feels.
"We found that during the limited email use week, participants experienced significantly lower daily stress than during the unlimited email use week," they write. "Lower stress, in turn, predicted higher well-being on a diverse range of well-being outcomes. These findings highlight the benefits of checking email less frequently for reducing psychological stress."
A report on the study by the New Republic makes the point that while small, "this is still a promising study, in part because neither group fully followed directions: While the baseline level of email checks per day was 15.5, the limited-email group checked email more often than they were supposed to (4.5 times a day instead of 3), and the unlimited-email group still checked theirs less than usual (12.5 times per day). In other words, it might be that if the groups had followed the directions better, there would have been a bigger gap between their email habits and therefore bigger differences in their stress levels (though there's no way to say for sure, of course)."
But the researchers directly state that their findings do not suggest that changing how often people check email would be a "panacea for improving well-being."
The findings shouldn't be exaggerated, Kushlev notes, telling the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, "First of all, we only manipulated frequency of checking and not the amount of time people spend on email. And second we don't find any direct effects on meaning in life or anything else that we measured except stress."
Still, the next time you feel overwhelmed at work, what could it hurt to try ignoring your inbox for a while?
Caitlin Dewey of The Washington Post contributed some information for this report.
ActiveStyle on 12/15/2014