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"... Read more...
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"... Read more...
