Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Check It Continuously or Wait - The E-mail Debate!
Posted by Jon Westfall in "Pocket PC Talk" @ 05:30 AM
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?
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?
