Changing Email Habits

A change of role & change of workplace introduces a whole bunch of disruption to your workflow, and I'm finding myself dealing with new laptops, new operating systems, new email & calendaring and so on (I haven't even seen yet what I'll have to deal with for travel & expenses...)

It also introduces the opportunity to try to make some workflow changes for the better. Ever since I started using "proper" email for work in 1995 (as opposed to the weird old internal messaging systems earlier in the past), I've always had an email client sitting in the background, popping up messages as soon as they came in and demanding my attention.

It's probably self-evident, but it turns out this is really bad for productivity - studies into the effects of interruptions, such as this paper by Loughborough University & The Danwood Group, and described by Ben Hammersley in this address to the RSA, show that people tend to respond almost immediately to notifications of new email, and that dealing with the interruption requires "recovery" time afterward. For tasks that require a "flow" to be  achieved (such as coding, writing or other creative activity), it can take up to 20 minutes to get back into the swing of things, so in cases where email is automatically checked and alerted on every 5-15 minutes (the default for Outlook), some people never get a chance to get into a flow.

So new workflow habit #1 - set email check times to at least 30 minutes.

I might move this out to 1-2 hours, later on.  Some people are disciplined enough to only check email once or twice a day (using an auto-responder to inform correspondents to expect a delay). This may seem extreme, but when you consider that business communication used to be via dictated & type-written letter, it's still comparatively high-speed, and leaves the receiver more time to concentrate - which in the end leads to greater efficiency & productivity.


On another note, I usually try to make my email subject lines meaningful & relevant, and it turns out this can have a significant impact on whether they are read or not. In Dan Pink's recent address to the RSA (where he asserts that everyone is now in sales), he notes research that shows that having an interesting subject line: something that either shows direct value to the recipient (eg: information about a topic that person is currently working on), or sparks curiosity about the email's content (the current classic example being Barack Obama's "Hey..." email during the 2012 presidential campaign), makes the message much more likely to be read than more mundane/nonspecific subjects such as  "Question"  or "Followup".

So new workflow habit #2 - [continue to] make sure email subjects are relevant & interesting.


Number 1 is going to be tougher than number 2 - and I may have to overcome and/or deal with expectations of others around me - so it will be interesting to see how it works out.