What Rats and Heroin Can Teach Us About Email

The modern addict doesn’t need syringes or lighters, just an inbox.

Instead of snorting line after line, we try to chip away out our lives one unread message at a time. Instead of sharing emails, we click “reply all.” We are addicted to email, and we need help.

Like any addict, we don’t really get any pleasure from these habits, and the first step to recovery is to admit there’s a problem. Given the literature and studies available about email, that second step is the easy one.

Researchers have even coined a special name for email addiction: “workplace telepressure.” More so, they found that email can actually be unhealthy for some people and a “a fixation on work email can contribute to physical and mental burnout.”

In fact, a survey by the McKinsey Global Institute revealed that the average worker spent about 2.6 hours per day reading and answering emails. That adds up to about one month per year. For some people, that’s more than their vacation and sick time combined.

Our devotion to the inbox isn’t making us happier, it isn’t making us more productive, and it doesn’t make us enjoy our jobs more. Instead, email can feel like a job in and of itself.

So why do we do it?

I think we rely so heavily on email only because we don’t know any better. Really, I think we need to take a cue from drug-addled rats.

For decades, the common perception of drug addiction has been that drugs create a chemical dependency that takes control of the user and leaves them hopelessly hooked unless they’re brave enough to go through a painful withdrawal. I’m not arguing that’s incorrect, but I am saying there’s reason to believe it might not paint the complete picture.

In the 1970s, a Canadian psychology professor named Bruce Alexander noticed that previous experiments shared a common problem: Each experiment focused on a solitary rat to see how it became hooked on a given drug (usually heroin or cocaine laced in a water bottle) and whether it would choose to quit cold turkey or continue nurturing its addictions. So Alexander conducted a new experiment to see whether the rat’s social environment had any influence on addiction. What he found was startling: The rats that were placed within rich, social groups had no interest in drugs, but the isolated rats became heavy users.

This experiment was even carried out in the real world with real humans, where Portugal was able to reduce its own massive heroin problem by 50% — half! — simply by placing addicts in strongly connected communities and giving them tools to live better, more complete lives.

The main takeaway is that humans (and rats) want to be social. We want to interact and be a part of a community. When we’re stripped of those basic interactions, we’re more likely to slip into harmful behavior patterns.

And this is why I think we are addicted to email, not because it’s just some unfortunate reality of the workplace, but because we haven’t let ourselves be social. Unlike the rats in the early experiments, which got hooked on drugs because they were never provided with anything better, we have the ability to change but still choose the option we know to be harmful.

How to get clean

“Yeah?” you say apathetically. “Email’s not that great, but what do you propose that’s any better?”

That is, of course, a fair response. Maybe email is just an unfortunate necessity of the workplace. Maybe most people fall victim to their inboxes because there isn’t anything better.

But I say that maybe we’ve been asking the wrong questions. Rather than searching for ways to replace email, why don’t we simply adopt strategies that utilize email as just one tool in the toolbox?

Like any tool, email has a purpose if it’s used properly. In order to bring back the sanctity of the inbox, we should focus on its strengths. Email is not great at handling all our communications or serving as an overworked digital personal assistant. But we can refocus the communications that are directed to email in order to make them fit within the complete range of daily communications. In this way, email is a tool for communications that require active engagement, and not a receptacle for the general noise of the office.

To break the inbox-addiction cycle we need to fill our lives with something more, and allow ourselves to communicate openly within a social group. Whether that’s with Yammer, OneNote, SharePoint, OneDrive, or even the inbox, every tool has its place relative to its purpose and how it’s used.

Much like the circle of life (cue “The Lion King”) the tools of communication fall into the cadence of a broader work cycle.

Traditionally, the inbox was a one-stop shop for all things work, often resulting in confusing strings of “reply all” email chains, duplicated work, miscommunication within teams and between teams, and an overall sense of disorganization. That’s because no one email message has any inherent priority over another — red flag or no red flag, it’s all part of the same mess.

But it can be better; we can do better. For example:

• A discussion on Yammer leads to a meeting, which is coordinated via email invites.
• During and after the meeting, the team moves forward on a task to move the tracking of the project to a OneNote document.
• Group members use Yammer to continue the conversation that started in the meeting.
• Other members of the company passively watch the Yammer conversation, and add their own feedback based on the institutional knowledge of their team.
• All the feedback is incorporated on the OneNote (or into a shared document), finalized, and published to SharePoint.
• The entire company can view the work accomplished and give kudos and feedback via Yammer.
• That project sparks another idea within another team.
• The cycle starts again.

With email alone, this process could never evolve. The project would remain restricted to a few key members communicating over isolated email threads. In the end, the project still gets done, but not as well as it could have been when the channel of communication is open. Worse yet, the quality of that project would never be as good as it could be with more group input.

As social creatures, we produce better work when we work together.

When we talk about working out loud, we don’t mean replicating the same messages across different pieces of software. Working out loud means no longer limiting ourselves to the habits we used to think were insurmountable. Sure, it’s not an easy transition to make, but after making that transition it’s hard to imagine working the old way.