This week's issue of Time Magazine includes an article ("The Off-Line American", page 52) about John McCain's admission that he is a Net newbie and that he has never felt any particular need to e-mail anyone. Before you log off thinking that I am trying to influence your vote...this is neither a political message nor a message about John McCain. I'm content to let you decide if you want to vote for McCain or Obama. This is a message about the joint study by Microsoft and the University of Illinois mentioned in the next to last paragraph of the article. Based on this study "it takes, on average, 16 minutes and 33 seconds for a worker interrupted by an e-mail to get back to what he or she was doing." I find that statistic absolutely astounding!
Let's see...16 minutes and 33 seconds converts to 993 seconds. There are 28,800 seconds available in an 8-hour workday. Now...hold that thought a moment. Some people are telling me they get hundreds of e-mails a day. I usually say, "Are you including all the junk e-mails and spam or are these just the ones from people you actually know?" They usually tell me they are not counting the junk and spam. I'm not sure I believe the 100-email-a day-story, but for purposes of discussion I'll go along with it for now. Let's forget the time it takes to get rid of the spam for now and just concentrate on the 100 so-called legitimate e-mails. OK, let's now assume that the e-mails are evenly distributed throughout the day. If you divided 28,800 seconds by 100, that means you would get an e-mail every 288 seconds (or every 4.8 minutes). So...considering all this...what if you worked about 5 minutes on a task and then responded to an e-mail interruption? Each block of work + e-mail response time would total 1,233 seconds (5 minutes or 300 seconds working on the task and 933 seconds handling the e-mail interruption). That means you could handle about 23 e-mails per workday (28,800 divided by 1,233). Therefore, each day you could spend about 115 minutes (5 minutes times 23) actually working on important tasks, 380 or so minutes handling e-mail interruptions...and 67 e-mails would stack up unaddressed each day (or between 17,000 and 20,000 for a typical work year).
Enough fun with math...I hope you get the point. You can't get much real work done if you don't learn to manage your e-mail interruptions (not to mention instant messages, text messages, voice mail, personal interruptions, etc.). So what is a person to do?
I think one of the quickest fixes to this kind of problem is to define it as an "interruption problem" rather than an e-mail problem. Stop focusing your attention on dealing with the tsunami of e-mails and focus on strategies to stop the interruptions, at least for a portion of the day. Here's a couple of quick suggestions to start turning this situation around:
- Set up a new e-mail address and only give it to people who...wait a minute, I don't need to tell you this...you decide will be among the chosen few to have this special honor.
- Make a daily commitment to designate a block (or several blocks) of your time as "no-interruptions-allowed-unless-someone-is-bleeding, projectile vomiting, or turning-blue" time. At a minimum, designate at least 20 percent of your day as "no workus interruptus" time.
If you study evolution, you'll discover that you basically have two options if you want to survive and prosper...you can get stronger or you can get smarter (notice one of these options is not to get stranger, for example, actually believing that this problem is going to miraculously go away someday with no effort or change of behavior on your part). Trying to fight off a barrage of e-mails is the equivalent of trying to fight this problem with strength. Get smarter and stop letting so many other people control your agenda. Get in the habit of blocking out daily time for important issues and stick with this habit. Focus on the core issue and look for other ways to increase your high focus, high value, uninterrupted time each day. Do whatever it takes to stop productivity-killing workus interrupus.
Chris Crouch, president of DME Training and Consulting, has spent years researching and studying both the mental and physical aspects of being productive.
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