04-30-2008, 01:30 PM
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Executive Editor, Android Thoughts
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 3,233
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Check It Continuously or Wait - The E-mail Debate!
E-mail is a nasty little thing when you really think about it. It enables us to communicate information faster than any other media available today, is flexible enough to allow us to use it both professionally (e.g. sending documents for review) and privately (e.g. sending pictures of our kids and pets), and is reckless enough to give birth to the most heinous annoyance of the 21st century thus far: SPAM. E-mail, love it or hate it, is here to stay - which prompts me to question how we use it. Last summer we had an interesting discussion about E-mail organization strategies, which revealed that there seem to be two types of E-mailers, those with clean inboxes and those with multiple pieces of E-mail keeping the inbox nicely stocked. Today I'd like to address a different yet related question: How often do you check E-mail?
Checking E-mail used to be a quaint little thing back in the days of dial-up. You dialed in, hit "Send/Receive" and waited as E-mail goodness flowed in. Perhaps you did a bit of replying, archiving, or ignoring, hit "Send/Receive" one more time and logged off. Then broadband hit us, and many of us (I suspect) started keeping Outlook running, so that we could get email more or less as it came in (e.g. having it automatically send/receive every 5 minutes). Then Exchange Servers came around and we had Outlook in Connected mode, hearing a little ding every so often that called us over to it. Somewhere around this time, I think some of us became slaves to E-Mail: Hear the ding, check it out, go back to work until... DING... check E-mail, go back to work.... DING... etc...
About 2 years ago, I read an article by Henry Roediger, in which he suggested that academics try to avoid E-mail maddness by setting up various times throughout the day to check E-Mail, and leaving Outlook closed the rest of the time. I thought that was nuts: I've got a Windows Mobile device - why shouldn't I continuously check my mail all day? After all, I can stay on top of things and keep my inbox nice and clean. I didn't think much about his article until late last year when I thought "Gee, maybe I should try it"...
So I opened up Outlook and I de-selected any instant notification options for E-Mail. No Desktop alert, no ding, no change in the icon. Outlook could now run minimized and I had no idea how many E-Mails were flowing in. I also put my Pocket PC or Smartphone aside and refused to look at it (I even turned it over so I wouldn't glance at it out of the corner of my eye). Guess what happened? I had some of the most productive afternoons on record. Flying through lecture notes, papers to grade, forums to check, students to meet with, papers to revise, etc... Sometime around the end of the day I'd bring up Outlook and find, usually, that nothing important had been missed. I'd do some quick replying, a bit of filing, and close up and go home. It seemed that I'd gotten to a happy place E-mail wise. I made the Outlook notification changes on my other PCs and prepared for a life of productivity.
But it wasn't that simple. Some afternoons that I tried this, I did miss pretty important and urgent E-mails, which prompted people to call me, which was more of a distraction than E-mail had been in the first place. Other times I'd spend an afternoon working on a project that was delayed - a delay I didn't hear about until after the work was done because the organizers had E-mailed me about the delay. Still other times I'd miss personal E-mails which I would have liked to reply to quickly. It seemed that turning off notifications to E-mail wasn't a global godsend as much as a "works 50% of the time" measure. Now I could set up elaborate filters to let me know when certain E-mails come in while ignoring others, however that's pretty time consuming given the fact that the vast majority of my contacts have no idea that you can set E-mails to higher or lower importance, and the fact that I work with E-mail from a variety of sources (e.g. academics, students, computer technicians, geeks, journalists, software vendors, friends, etc...). Thus far a perfect solution has eluded me.
Are you a continuously connected E-Mailer? Do you know the second an E-mail comes in? Or do you take an approach similar to Roediger's, and have pre-set E-checking times? And what works best for you?
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Dr. Jon Westfall, MCSE, MS-MVP
Executive Editor - Android Thoughts
News Editor - Windows Phone Thoughts
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04-30-2008, 02:46 PM
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Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Sep 2006
Posts: 3,060
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The challenge I've had when coping with this issue is reconciling my PERSONAL style with my EMPLOYER'S culture. At one company for which I've worked, the unwritten rule was that we were expected to notice and respond to e-mails fairly immediately. In fact, I used to get follow-up e-mails and phone calls from people saying, "I sent that e-mail nearly 15 minutes ago and haven't heard from you..."
With my current employer, it's "understood" that everybody's too busy to constantly check our inboxes, so if you need an immediate response, you pick up the phone. This is the approach that works better for me.
Personally, I've had to teach myself to not drop everything whenever a new message arrives or to not check my inbox too often. As I was learning more about my newly-diagnosed attention deficit disorder a few years ago, I found out that it can take somebody with ADD around 45 minutes to get back into "focus" after an unexpected interruption. I've also learned that there are certain times of the day when I'm more productive performing different activities; as a result, I handle most of my heaviest inbox processing very first thing in the morning and late in the afternoon.
The unfortunate thing is that, if we were all a little more judicious when using the "urgent" flag, it would make it a lot easier to figure out exactly which messages need attention right away and which ones can wait.
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04-30-2008, 03:23 PM
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Oracle
Join Date: Mar 2007
Posts: 952
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I keep my work phone (Motorola Q) on continuous alerts but I only glance at the sender/subject line when an email comes in. If the subject line or sender seems important I'll actually open the email, if not it can wait until later in the day. I get my personal email through Google and only check that every couple of days on a PC. I know I could setup an account on my phones to be constantly connected to both but this is my personal solution to the information overload problem being continuously connected to email has been known to cause.
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04-30-2008, 04:02 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 191
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One of the (many) reasons I prefer WM over a Blackberry (far and away the most common device at work) is that I want email on 'my terms." I am fortunate that our corporate culture is that even though some people use email like SMS email are not expected to be responded to right away unless also accompanied by an urgent voice mail alerting us to the email (that sounds like double, but it really does not happen very often. My view is that if you need something right away, call me. That's why I have my cell. If I don't answer i wouldn't be responding to an email either. 
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04-30-2008, 04:59 PM
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Neophyte
Join Date: Aug 2004
Posts: 8
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Pocket PC vs Crackberry
Hi. I completely agree with Schmenge, AMEN! That's why I use my Pocket PC, because I am not a slave to my email. I want email on my terms. Where as some companies and people with the push techonology want email to be more real-time. That is what texting or IM'ing is for. Email is for me, is a STORE and FORWARD technology.
That said, one of my colleagues is a lab monitor for our racks and when we have lab issues, we need them resolved immediately. So that, said, there are some occupations that do require instantaneous responses, but I am fortunate that mine is not one of them. I check my email(both work and personal) about once an hour with my pocket pc or when I have downtime.
Plus with the advent of handhelds, has changed the scope of the initial email debate question, he posed, where he seemed limited to desktop email behavior. Obviously handhelds have increased our face time with emails as well as prolonged our working hours. I have sat in many restaurants and bars on the road and seen people tending to emails beyond work hours, myself included.
My two cents,
James
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04-30-2008, 05:39 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 120
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. . . must have email . . . must have email. . . all play and no work makes Craig a dull boy . . .
I have my AT&T 8525 constantly delivering my work email (through a Good Tech server) as well as mail from two of my gmail accounts. Several other gmail accounts and all five through TWC have to wait until I get home to check them.
Sometimes I think that I am a bit too connected; but hey, that is what tech is for . . . to make our lives "easier."
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Dilbertism: I don't have an attitude problem, you have a perception problem.
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04-30-2008, 05:56 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 484
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I have four active POP3 email accounts and one IMAP. I manage each one differently. The IMAP (for my "day job") is easiest since I can have my desktop automatically download messages and still be able to see them on my Windows Mobile device. For the most of the POP3, I don't use automatic downloads any more. I check them periodically throughout the day either on my desktop or on my WM device depending on where I am at the moment. If I'm mobile, I use the phone to delete any messages that are SPAM or I don't need to save so that the desktop downloads are reduced.
Finally, one of my POP accounts gets LOTS of SPAM. I use the desktop to automatically download that one, since there's never anything urgent sent there anyway. If I need to check that one while I'm mobile, I use the WM version of GoToMyPC to view Outlook on the desktop.
In any case, my email is way too complicated and takes way too much of my time these days.
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04-30-2008, 06:11 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 197
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I like having e-mail that constantly updates because, when I choose to read it, it's current. However, I learned some time ago that anything which is given the right to interrupt you is a productivity killer, especially e-mail. Just because it's possible for you to instantly respond to an e-mail is no reason to feel that you have to and doubly no reason for others to expect you to do so. My rules of thumb (business and personal) are "If it's really urgent, call." and "If it has lots of details, write an e-mail." (So if it's both urgent and detailed, do both.)
I make every effort to answer e-mail once a day, except when I'm on vacation. Anyone who's dealt with me for any length of time learns to expect a response (even if it's just "I'm looking into that. I'll know more by ____.") within a day, but not immediately.
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04-30-2008, 07:04 PM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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Jon - a great article! I too, like many here, am overwhelmed by email and am constantly struggling to find a way to properly cope with it. My own methods include:- Only have Outlook 2007 set up on my main workstation and laptop
- Outlook 2007 is configured with all of my work email accounts, and my personal email account
- Windows Live Mail (the desktop client) is configured on all of my PCs for my personal email
- On the weekends, I rarely if ever open up Outlook - weekends are my time away from my job (sort of...anyone that knows these sites will see me mucking about on the weekends)
- I check my personal email quite a bit during the day/night/weekends, but the volume is so low, it's "fun" for me. :-)
- On my smartphone, I have push turned off. I have it set to check and sync every four hours. That's mostly because during the day, 90% of the time I'm at my desk with Outlook open
- I find that if I need to get some writing some (reviews, columns, etc.) I switch to my laptop and leave Outlook closed, or move to another PC that doesn't have Outlook installed - that allows me to switch "modes" in terms of my focus.
- I sometimes wonder if I have ADD. I really hate how our Western culture is so prone to slap a syndrome on every human behaviour, and medicate it all, but I really do have some focusing problems and I can relate to what Brad said about it taking 45 minutes to get "re-focused"
My real problem? RSS management! Now THERE'S a nightmare. I'm constantly scared to open Feedemon if it's been more than couple of days...
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04-30-2008, 07:31 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 251
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I have my desktop set to notify me whenever a message comes in. But like Don't Panic! I check the sender's name and subject line before I decide to stop what I am doing in order to respond. With my iPhone, I have it set to check every hour.
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