Email a "dangerous distraction"?

In the Sydney Morning Herald, writer Suw Charman-Anderson weighs in on the topic of how much time we waste checking email. Not the issue of deleting spam and fielding absurd requests from your boss (doesn't he understand how busy you are???), but simply breaking your train of thought from what you were doing before and concentrating on something else, then shifting gears to go back to the original task.

According to research quoted by Charman-Anderson, it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover from an email interruption. If you check your email once every five minutes, you waste 8 1/2 hours a week trying to determine what you were doing before you clicked over to Outlook. That sounds a bit high, but either way, email overload is no joke: 56 percent of users in a recent survey said that they spent more than two hours a day reading and writing email, and people really do tend to respond quickly (apparently, unless they're replying to me and I'm on deadline): The average email response time is a blazing 104 seconds.

This isn't the first time that email has been implicated as a distraction, possibly a mentally detrimental one. This post from on a similar topic from last March really struck a nerve with readers, garnering 599 comments. The advice back then (check email less often) was, in part, the same that Charman-Anderson gives, but there's a spin on it this time. Consider this: "Dr Renaud's team discovered that while 64% of respondents claimed to check their email once an hour, and 35% said they checked every 15 minutes, they were actually checking it much more frequently, about once every five minutes. For some people, checking email is no longer a conscious and deliberate act, but a compulsion they are barely aware of." One author later goes on to compare the compulsion associated with email to people playing slot machines. Ouch!

Take some of Charman-Anderson's advice with a grain of salt: She is a social networking software consultant, and one gets the feeling that she might be promoting alternative tools that are a far bigger waste of time than email. Twitter and IM are both enormous productivity drains, and dealing with wikis can strain the patience of even the the most frazzled emailer, but Charman-Anderson recommends them all. Scheduling email time isn't really practical for most people; most employers would freak out if you ignored their emails all day except for once in the morning and once in the late afternoon. On the other hand, some suggestions, like turning off alerts and using your email client to quickly scan subjects and the first few lines of an email so you can quickly dispatch them are spot on.

LINK: Email becomes a dangerous distraction