Does E-Mail Make People Stupid?
April 13, 2010
E-mail, texting, instant messaging, cell phones, BlackBerries and other "new" modes of communications have been touted as indispensable communications tools for today's workplace. However, according to Joe Robinson of Entrepreneur Magazine, these tools are "saboteurs" of productivity lurking within the heart of your company.
Disguised as instruments of productivity, they are subverting your staff's most precious resource: attention. Incessant e-mail alerts, instant messages, buzzing BlackBerrys and cell phones are decimating workplace concentration. The average information worker--basically anyone at a desk--loses 2.1 hours of productivity every day to interruptions and distractions, according to Basex, an IT research and consulting firm.
And that time equals money, says Robinson, who reports that Intel estimated that e-mail overload can "cost large companies as much as much as $1 billion a year in lost productivity." The communications intrusions are constant, with a typical office worker checking e-mails 50 times per day and using instant messaging 77 times. This not only distracts workers from their current tasks, but also impinges upon their attention spans and increases stress.
The interruption epidemic is reaching a crisis point at some companies and shows no sign of slowing. E-mail volume is growing at a rate of 66% a year, according to the E-Policy Institute. More people are texting. More are using Facebook or Twitter for work.
Robinson's story goes on to describe the "myth of multitasking:
Human brains come equipped with two kinds of attention: involuntary and voluntary. Involuntary attention, designed to be on the watch for threats to survival, is triggered by outside stimuli--what grabs you. It's automatically rattled by the workday cacophony of rings, pings and buzzes that are turning jobs into an electronic game of Whac-a-Mole. Voluntary attention is the ability to concentrate on a chosen task.
As workers' attention spans are whipsawed by interruptions, something insidious happens in the brain: Interruptions erode an area called effortful control and with it the ability to regulate attention. In other words, the more you check your messages, the more you feel the need to check them--an urge familiar to BlackBerry or iPhone users.
"Technology is an addiction," says Gayle Porter, a professor of management at Rutgers University who has studied e-compulsion. "If someone can't turn their BlackBerry off, there's a problem."
And the larger tech companies are starting to address the problem.
E-interruptions are making it so hard to do that that Google, Microsoft, IBM and Intel are members of the Information Overload Research Group, formed in 2008 to collaborate on research, develop best practices and host forums to share new approaches. It's self-preservation as much as anything; computer engineers were among the first to show symptoms of e-interruption exposure.
