Help I Think I Have an Email Addiction!

My iPhone has been both a blessing and a curse. On the plus side are all the great apps, the ability to find good restaurants on any street and having all modes of communication at my fingertips. But on the downside it has created a compulsive desire to check my emails at a ridiculous frequency. I was unaware of this until last week my partner and I were watching TV and she asked me what on earth I was doing checking my inbox during every advert break!

The next day I began to wonder what the extent of my email addiction was. So I did an experiment. I carried around a pad and pen for a day and marked down every visit to my inbox. The result was quite frightening – around thirty times! Email had started to take over my life!

Some research showed I was not alone. In a study Dr Karen Renaud of University of Glasgow found that although 64% of people claimed to check their email only once an hour in fact the vast majority checked it every 5 minutes.

Dr Tom Stafford of the University of Sheffield postulates that the same cognitive processes that cause addiction to slot machines are at work with email checking. People follow what is called a “variable interval reinforcement schedule.” When you put coins in slot machine you get rewarded at irregular intervals. If you knew every say tenth coin gave you a payout, there isn’t so much incentive to put one more coin in. Whereas when the payouts are infrequent, it’s always feels worth just putting one more pound in the slot. Email checking is very similar. Most times you check there is just spam, but every now and again you get something interesting, an invite to a party, an old friend getting in touch or an offer of new work.

But hey – you could be addicted to worse things right? What’s all the fuss about? Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University showed that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of through after interruption by email. So people who check their email every 5 minutes waste 8.5 hours per week!

So what do you do about all this? Well I have no magic answers. My solution was to keep marking in my notepad how many email checks I was doing for a few days. This new awareness enabled me to dramatically cut back You’ll be glad to hear that I’m down to three checks a day now! I have also noticed a dramatic rise in my productivity.

Some companies have tried more extreme ideas. Deloitte piloted a “no email Wednesday”. It was soon abandoned as unworkable. IBM tried only having one computer in an office that could receive email. This was also quickly discarded.

Roo Reynolds, a social media expert working with the BBC advocates replacing emails with other communication tools for many situations. Instant messengers for quick chats, blogs and wiki’s for mass broadcasts, RSS feeds to keep up-to-date with important news. Reynolds’ ideas combined with a greater awareness of your email behaviour make sense to me.

What do you think about this? Are you a fellow email addict? Do you think the whole idea of email addiction is nonsense? Let us have your comments below.