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Checking Email Less Often Leads to More Productive Workdays
- spaceheretostay 8y ago> “We found that on days when managers reported high email demands, they report lower perceived work progress as a result, and in turn engage in fewer effective leader behaviors,” says Johnson. It seems this is largely a disparity in expectations of work. The managers self-reported feeling like they got less done when replying to more emails. But isn't supporting their team and being able to rapidly answer questions often part of a manager's job? And if not, perhaps they are in the wrong role. I would be more interested in measuring overall team productivity, not just the manager's self-reported version. I think you might find that the high-email-throughput teams do get more done with that extra emailing, even if the manager feels like they have been less productive.
- snarf21 8y agoI agree with your point completely. What are we measuring? Some people's work is intended only to make other people more productive. Knowledge work can't have everyone 100% isolated to get 100% productivity. This is a sliding scale and where good managers get paid for maximizing their team's productivity.
- quanticle 8y agoI was about to post something similar. Let's say, as a conservative estimate, a manager oversees 5 ICs. Let's also assume, generously, that the manager becomes 50% more productive if he or she doesn't reply to e-mails until the end of the day. If the "overflow" from that strategy causes the ICs to become even 5% less productive, the gain in the manager's productivity is more than wiped out, and the team as a whole is worse off. A large part of a manager's job is to shield his or her team from e-mails, Slack messages, and other productivity-sapping interruptions. If a manager is grading him or herself by their individual productivity, they're doing management wrong. If an organization is grading its managers by their individual productivity, rather than whether their teams are meeting their objectives, the organization is doing management wrong.
- sidlls 8y agoEmails are one medium to support my team. They're not suitable for a rapid response to anything. If something is that urgent it warrants an in-person conversation or video conference. E-mails are great for medium to large scale logistics and status communication: organizing meetings, ensuring participants have access to necessary documentation, and communicating the status of some on going project.
- cascom 8y agoyou mean not interrupting yourself is better than constantly interrupting?! I would say pretty much everyone knows this, however until expectations change around responsiveness, nothing will happen.
- avn2109 8y agoThis just in! Fire is hot, water is wet! More at eleven.
- tareqak 8y agoKnowing a fact is one thing, but incorporating said fact into your life such that you live it and reap the rewards is another.
- cascom 8y ago100%, I live this all the time! I'm just saying why even bother trying when you know that its not an option...
- scholia 8y agoLet all your colleagues know that you only ready emails at specific times, eg start of day, after lunch, end of day (replace with actual hours if possible). And if there's something urgent inbetween times, they have to call you. It worked for me ;-)
- woile 8y agoI found my days much more productive when I close email and slack and I just check it maybe every some hours
- donatj 8y agoFrom the things I hear about email from people online, I must have really lucked out to be so sheltered from it. I've worked for a number of companies in my life, and I now work for a relatively large corporation - and email has never been a problem. Since Monday I have received 7 non-automated emails (lots of automated emails, sorted into folders) and only one of them required action on my part.
- GordonS 8y agoI work for a megacorp (~250,000 emloyees) - the level of spam messages it puts out every day to all employees is honestly just staggering. I guess I average 7 such emails a day, never mind a week. Just as bad, is many of them are repeated, over and over again - some every few days for a while, some every week in perpetuity. And even worse is that every single company email that goes out is an image. And I don't mean contains images - the actual email body is a single image with crappy 90's graphics and rendered text! On the odd occasion where you want to copy and paste, you're out of luck. I've got several Exchange rules set up to put them in a "Cruft" folder, but new ones keep popping up, and every once in a while it catches a "real" email, so I still need to check it from time to time. /rant
- oftenwrong 8y agoSimilar situation here. I didn't even check my email today. If there is something important I will be notified, either automatically or by a slack mention/direct-message.
- j7ake 8y agoHow do you infer the direction of causality here? I've noticed that there are days when I am hyper focused and I don't check my email once. Other days I am not feeling focussed (or tired) and I end up checking email often.
- walshemj 8y agoI have had to point out to colleagues that I might always check mail when I come in and again at lunch time. But if I am engaged in a task I might not look at mail for several hours.
- sleepybrett 8y agono shit.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ryanstrug 8y agoI disagree. It keeps me more engaged.
- Agathos 8y agoWhat if I didn't check my email but only because I was trading memes on Slack all day?
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoSurely that counts as more productive work day? ;)
- Notorious_BLT 8y agoI always find it weird when Hacker News gets obsessed with productivity. Productivity is what employers want, as an employee I couldn't care less if our open office plan or our heavy use of slack makes me less productive, that's a problem for my employer to recognize and solve for if they decide they care.
- diminoten 8y agoWhy don't you care about your own productivity? Part of the agreement you struck with your employer is that you provide value, don't you want to provide that value?
- ggm 8y agoAsymmetric agreement asymmetric benefit.
- notfromhere 8y agoIf you provide value X to an employer for payment Y, they're not going to increase your payment in proportion to your increase in productivity. Frequently employers won't give you any additional compensation for increased productivity. So the game theory really favors workers optimizing the time it takes to provide value X
- diminoten 8y agoThe agreement isn't for X, the agreement was for "whatever you can provide". You don't provide a unit of work, you provide "your brain as applied to the problems of the company". Game theory is for the company to fire you and find someone who will honor their contract...
- notfromhere 8y agoYour employer hires you to solve a problem, they don't get rights to unlimited productivity. You're held to a specific quality/output of work, and as long as that's satisfactory, you remain employed. The game theory is to produce enough quality/output to remain employed. An employee increasing their productivity without increased compensation for said productivity is a bit of a sucker.
- topicseed 8y agoThe headline, at least in my head, reads as "being less distracted leads to more productive workdays". Mind-blowing discovery.
- edoceo 8y agoDo you remember the first time you saw a headline that was basically that? 1997, I'm riding BART to SF, like 20/yr old, reading a similar article in this rag called Wired. Wasn't it about Slack last year tho?
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y agoI check my email once (or zero times) a day, slack 2 or 3 times. People bug me about not getting their emails occasionally, but I'm busy actually getting shit done. My team knows if it's important, than can just interrupt me. We all work right next to each other -- open office -- it's not a big deal. I don't know how anyone could get a lot of work done, while responding to dozens of messages and emails promptly. That's a full time job in and of itself.
- ravenstine 8y agoThis is the same reason why I hardly participate in Slack and only reply to non-emergency PMs at my convenience. My job is a lot easier when I can actually concentrate on a problem, but for some reason our culture doesn't value enough the state of focus or being in "the zone".
- leetcrew 8y agoI do wonder (and I'm not accusing you specifically) how much people conflate their own productivity with the team's productivity. a particular engineer's productivity is undoubtedly harmed by interruptions, but you can indirectly accomplish a lot just by unblocking several junior engineers in an afternoon. I'm fortunate to work at a company where senior/lead devs get part of the credit when they facilitate someone else's work.
- xfitm3 8y agoI'd love to see a comparable study on Slack, I predict there will be a similar finding.
- fourier_mode 8y agoUnless you work as a human tester for an email client.
- thatoneuser 8y agoNo way. That coworker who spends 40 mins of every hour on email gets way more done. They're sure of it.
- JamesBarney 8y agoSure it makes the person who's not checking his emails more productive but what about the guy waiting on his reply?
- josho 8y agoIf you are waiting at your desk for a reply and are truly blocked have you considered getting out of your desk to ask in person or similarly phoning them? If you truly aren’t blocked then what’s the problem waiting a few hours?
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago> If you truly aren’t blocked then what’s the problem waiting a few hours? Flow, possibly. Interleaving is frequently efficient, but it's not always best.
- ppeetteerr 8y agoIn other research news, finding shows strong correlation that sunlight brightens up a room /s
- maimeowmeow 8y agoshocked_pickachu.jpg
- booleandilemma 8y agoI find I’m most productive when I close Outlook altogether.
- forinti 8y agoI would but I can't avoid people who call me to tell me that they have just sent me an email. Or worse: people who come by with a piece of paper with the number of the workflow they just initiated. I manage to remain civil, but I can't help some sarcasm escaping.
- neilv 8y agoYou can set some email client filter rules that trigger notification for things you should probably see promptly, and have no notification/indicator by default. (Or variations on that, like defaulting to notification but suppressing it for known non-urgent things, and moving lists to folders.) An alternative thing I've done, when billing time for a client, is to make a client-specific email account, and only have a email client running for that account. Having aggressive spam filter also helps. (Mine, every sender that's not in my addressbook or from particular domains goes into a junk folder without notification, which I check at least once a day, but I'm almost never interrupted by spam.)
- triplee 8y agoSure, I barely check email. Why do I get nothing done? Oh yeah, Slack.