Forty-seven thousand hours: that’s how much time you could potentially waste on email over the course of your working life, according to a recent Washington Post article. To put that number in perspective, it’s roughly equivalent to spending five years on email.
As the writer Annie Dillard said: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And increasingly, we are spending our days largely on email. The average office worker dips into their inbox about 11 times an hour, receives about 147 messages a day, and spends nearly 30% of their total working week in their inbox.
But just because we’re spending all this time on email doesn’t mean we’re enjoying it. When I talk to people about their email habits, the most common feelings they mention are guilt, anxiety, and overwhelm – certainly not enthusiasm. What’s more, research shows that the more frequently we check our email, the more stressed out we feel.
So why do we spend so much time doing something that we don’t particularly enjoy? The fact is that even though we might not care for the content of every email we receive, many of us are addicted to the act of checking email. It activates a primal impulse in our brains to seek out rewards. And in this regard we’re not very different from rats.
Back in the 1930s, the psychologist BF Skinner invented a device called the “operant conditioning chamber”, now known as the Skinner box, which he used to test behavioural theories on rats. Skinner wanted to see what effect different kinds of positive reinforcements, such as food pellets, and negative reinforcements, such as electric shocks, would have on the animals.
First, he experimented with putting the rats on a fixed schedule of behaviour reinforcement. For instance, if the rat pressed the lever inside the box, it would receive a food pellet. If it continued pressing the lever, every hundredth time the rat would receive another pellet. Skinner also experimented with a variable schedule. In this scenario the rat didn’t know when the reward was coming. It might have to press the lever 20 times to get a pellet, or it might have to press the lever 186 times to get a pellet. The system was random, and the rat could never know exactly when the reward was coming.
Surprisingly, the rats were significantly more motivated when they were on the variable schedule. Skinner found that even if he took away the rewards for the rats on the variable schedule, they would keep working, furiously pressing the lever for a very long time before giving up – much longer, in fact, than the rats on the fixed schedule would.
Is this starting to sound familiar yet? For better or worse, humans respond to positive rewards very similarly to rats. And as Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist who studies the irrational actions of humans, explained to me: email is a near-perfect random rewards system.
Most of the time when you “press the lever” to check your email messages, you get something disappointing or bothersome – a communication from a frustrated client or a boss with an urgent request. But every once in a while you press the lever and you get something exciting – an email from a long-lost friend or, if you’re really lucky, a cat video. And it’s those random rewards that we find so addictive. They make us want to push the lever again and again and again, even when we have better things to do.
But it cuts both ways: while you might get something good, you also might get something upsetting or anxiety-inducing. And that feeling of queasy uncertainty is another aspect of email’s strange allure.
How many times have you confidently sent off a message only to find yourself stewing, just minutes later, over why you have not yet received a response? Wondering if your request or your phrasing had been received as it was intended? Worried that you yourself should have written back sooner, said something differently, asked for less, or asked for more?
This problem springs from a lack of social feedback. Normally when we communicate with someone in person, or even on the phone, we are reading a thousand little social cues as we talk and deciding what to do next based on those cues. It often happens that we will start to say something but then, based on non-verbal feedback we get from the other person, think better of it and take another tack. When we communicate through email, however, that social feedback loop is absent. Emails lack the facial expressions, physical gestures, and vocal tone that typically shape our interpretation of what someone is saying and allow us to adjust our delivery in order to get our true meaning across.
This results in what the psychologist Daniel Goleman calls a natural “negativity bias” towards email. Goleman argues that if the sender feels positive about an email, then the receiver usually feels neutral. And if the sender feels neutral about the message, then the receiver typically feels negative about it. In other words, it’s as if every message you send gets automatically downgraded a few positivity notches by the time someone else receives it.
Well that’s all well and good, you might be thinking, but what am I supposed to do about it?
The solution to our email problem lies with getting more in touch with what makes us uniquely human. Overcoming the negativity bias, and allaying some of its attendant anxiety, requires us to upgrade our empathy and enthusiasm when it comes to digital communication. To communicate more like living, breathing, feeling humans than impersonal robots exchanging information.
A recent study done by the people behind the Boomerang email app crunched the data from millions of email exchanges and found that messages that expressed emotion were most likely to get a response. And among those, emails using positive words and subjective language earned the most replies. In other words, messages that encouraged people and expressed a point of view were the most effective. We don’t want neutral, anodyne, just-the-facts-ma’am messages, we want to communicate with people who are interesting and interested.
Another quality that separates us from animals and robots alike is the ability to set goals and pursue them with single-minded focus. As humans, we are uniquely equipped to train our attention on a given task and keep it there – to not be distracted by random rewards or false urgency or Fomo (fear of missing out). To focus instead on long-term goals and meaningful rewards. But right now we are choosing to succumb to email’s addictive allure – and to let it dictate our mood, our focus, and our to-do lists at work – rather than marshalling up the willpower that we know is necessary to turn our attention away from our inboxes.
The data is clear about the drawbacks of living in email. Those who process their messages reactively, nibbling on notifications and multitasking throughout the day, are significantly less productive and less happy than those who process their email in batches, choosing two or three discrete time blocks per day to focus 100% on their email so that they can ignore it the rest of the time.
When it comes to email, exercising just a little self-control goes a long way. Can you go an hour without peeking into your inbox? Can you distinguish between what’s truly urgent and what’s not? Can you say “no” to some opportunities so that you can say “yes” to your priorities?
The bottom line is: if we want to get out of the productivity rat race, we have to stop acting like rats.