Email: No Pony Express

Every year on my birthday, my mom sends me a handwritten card. It usually has a bunch of heart stickers stuck all over the envelope, inside and out. There is also often a crisp $5 bill inside, but that's beside the point. I'm sure the post office guy thinks I'm a big wuss, but I don't care. I love these letters from my mom. Plus, my dad worked at the US Post Office for over 30 years, so if the guy has a beef with me, I'll find out where he lives, too. Two can play the game of "I know where you live."

Anyway, what I want to talk about is email, both about how it crushes your soul and clutters your work life. Of course, it also has the potential to do much good, but only if you use it right.

Prof Arthur Hill at the Carlson School of Management has more than 30 years of research, teaching, and consulting in operations management and (quite efficiently) can talk about managing time and work effectively. He says he once spoke with a dean who admitted to having more than 6,000 unopened emails.

For most of us, the barrage of emails is not quite that extreme, but the problem of too much to do contributes to stress, worry, and guilt, says Hill.

Hill says it's important to remember a few simple rules, and some of them, I admit, seem downright foreign. For example, "Never check email in the morning," is one of his most important rules. He says instead that we should start the day with goals and bigger projects--email should not be on a "to-do" list.

Other email advice from Hill:

• Abide by the two-minute rule--if it takes less than two minutes, do it now.

• Write short emails with very concise and meaningful subject lines and do not cc unless absolutely necessary--very often, the cc is not necessary and is a waste of many people's time.

• Reduce the number of emails you write to reduce the number you receive. Do not write a "thank you" email every time you receive a correspondence.

•  Never have more than one screen of emails open at a time.

•   Open an email once, and process it right away.
  

Finally, says Hill, remember that interruptions occur about every 2.5 minutes, and it usually takes about 10 minutes to recover from each interruption. The main source of the interruption? You.

There's also a somewhat academic analysis of email online... Email's Dark Side

A few things it notes:

You check more often than you think: Participants in a study by Renaud et al. (2006) claimed to check their email, on average, once an hour. However when the researchers spied on them, it turned out they checked their email every five minutes.

Email eats a quarter (23%) of the working day

It takes 64 seconds to recover from an email

Email kills sarcasm (and emotional communication)

People feel less co-operative

Email negotiations often feel difficult, especially with people we don't know well.

There's little argument that personal, handwritten letters mean more than an email...some visceral component a computer just hasn't captured yet still tugs at our "aww, mom" heartstrings. But if you use it sparingly and supplement it with face-to-face and the occasional phone call (texting doesn't count), you'll have a more meaningful--and productive--work life. And your mom doesn't want an email anyway.