The zero-inbox myth or the email avalanche
Lillian O’Neam has arrived at 9 am at her workplace, a famous web agency of the region. A hard workday is awaiting her. With a hot coffee and the best will in the world, she signs in at her mail client on lillian.oneam@gotmail.com. Then, she starts working on her first task of the day: a simple update of some photos on the website of her client. She plans to finish this task before the end of the day. There is nothing much left to do. She even have a high hope to finish before the lunch break.
At 9:10 am, her boss Herman Adger sends her an email, to tell her an unforeseen event has occurred. She absolutely must update the graphical guideline of one page of a website. It must be delivered to the client before the end of the day. Lillian decides to treat the email immediately. The task is short, and even finished within an hour. Satisfied, Lillian delivers the improvements, warns her boss, and gets back to its initial task.
At 10:15 am, Lillian has hardly got back to her task context. Herman Adger comes back to her with an email. He asks her an adjustment on what she has made. The client has just asked for a last minute change, and she must absolutely and immediately handle this.
At 10:45 am, Lillian O’Neam can finally come back to her photos, after she has considered the client request. But at 10:50 am, a new email from Herman Adger pops in her inbox. A service provider must be contacted again. Lillian does it immediately, without losing a single second. She gives a few minutes to that email and gets back to her work.
At 11 am, Lillian receives an email from a colleague, who asks her some details about a project they worked together the day before. Lillian starts writing an answer email. After ten minutes, this colleague pops his head around the corner. He is surprised not having got back an answer from her. Lillian stops writing and talks to him directly. The interview goes off topic and becomes inefficient, until both of them decide to take a break to lunch.
Lillian comes back fast, and decides to sacrifice the rest of her pause to her photos update that still hasn’t progressed. A little disappointed, she decides to give her all to finish before the end of the lunch break.
At 1pm, she has just come back for 15 minutes. A new email falls into her inbox. Herman Adger asks her to lend a hand to the team next door, which is completely bogging down. After a long sigh, she heads for them.
At 2pm, Lillian comes back to her desk without having brought any efficient help to the team, which didn’t really need help, after all. Ten minutes later, a new email rings. Another colleague is struggling against a new tool the enterprise had just bought. Lillian acknowledges and heads for her colleague. When she finally arrives, he has just found the solution to his original problem. As Lillian is there, he takes advantage of her reassuring presence to ask her a series of questions. Lillian is back to her desk at 3:10 pm.
At 3:15 pm, Herman Adger gives a new supposedly short task to her, asking her to treat it immediately. Lillian has no choice, she has to obey and abandon anything she was working on. It took her just ten minutes.
At 3:30 pm, Lillian receives a new email that is sent to many recipients, about a hot question. She reads this first email, and another pops, answering to the first one. Lillian decides to answer to that second email. During her writing, two other emails come into her inbox, answering both to the very first email. Lillian leaves her writing, telling herself it would be useless. The content of the last two emails are divergent, leading to a very confused discussion for almost half an hour, during which Lillian just sits and observe the ping-pong. After this great email battle, a concluding one convokes anyone to a general meeting. At 4 pm, Lillian gets back to her photos.
At 4:02 pm, Lillian is desperate when the email jingle rings. This is a proposition for a coffee break with the whole team. Tired, she accepts and waits for the “go” without really doing anything. At 4:04 pm, another colleague says he just needs a few minutes to finish a task. At 4:06 pm, another says he won’t come, because he got caught by his phone. At 4:09 pm, another email is sent to ask why the sender is alone at the cafeteria. The whole team answers every which way. The discussion goes on and on, and nobody seems to begin a move. At 4:15, as nobody moves, the pause break falls through. Lillian gets back to work.
At 4h30 pm, Lillian is interrupted by a new email from her works council, proposing a holiday trip for a reduced price. Lillian can’t refuse to have a look at the offer, and loses 15 minutes surfing on the website.
At 5:00 pm, the accounting service contacts her via an email, to ask her to provide some vouchers. Lillian spends 10 minutes to gather and send them.
At 5:15 pm, Lilian get back to her photo, again. At 5:20 pm, Herman Adger sends an email that she immediately reads. It requests her to send a progress report. The task she initially had on the morning shouldn’t have taken her more than a day. Herman reproaches her for being so late. Even with the best arguments in the world, Lillian can’t justify her delay. She will finish her day at 19:45 pm, exhausted.
Lillian has made a terrible mistake. She has considered her email inbox as a synchronous communication medium. As soon as an email popped up, she immediately rushed to it, treating it without even considering postponing it when it was not absolutely urgent. As soon as there were something to do in the email, she did it immediately. As a consequence, her mind needed to switch its context from her current task to another. Once the new task had been completed, Lillian got back to its original task, with a new mind context switch.
In a few words, a mind context switch is a brain operation in which the mind leaves the information of the current task in a backup memory to acquire new data to perform the new task. This switch is tiring, and needs an extra energy consumption. Furthermore, this context switch needs some time to operate. From a few seconds for simple tasks up to 20 minutes for the harder ones , those needing a total focus. As this context switch operates two times (one for the switch to the new task, the second to get back to the initial task), the time and energy loss is consequent.
Furthermore, if a context switch has to occur when another is already in progress, you’ll have the sensation to have thousands of things to do at the same time, increasing drastically the exhaustion and the stress at the end of the day.
Ok, but what can I do concretely?
The main problem lies in the fact a background task keeps being interrupted again and again, like in Lillian’s case. The solution is reducing, ideally deleting completely, every single interruption source. In the business world, it won’t be possible (and even more in an open-space, or in an office with several colleagues sitting next to you). Nevertheless, there is a simple way to get better.
Remember that time when emails just didn’t exist. Its ancestor was the paper mail. In enterprises, there were internal mails. There was a today forgotten job, with a simple goal: delivering the paper mails inside the enterprise walls. Looks like our modern email server, doesn’t it?
The paper mails were delivered once a day. It meant the answer to a request could not be sent back to the sender before the day after, in the best case. A mail was considered as asynchronous, in any way you could consider it. A sender would not just wait before her/his mail box, hoping a response would pop at any moment. So why do we do it with our modern email inbox?
What if… we got back to this way of thinking? What if our inbox became asynchronous for real? What if you had a look at it just one or two times a day, just at a predefined time in the day?
Just imagine. Once you arrive at your desk in the morning, you have a look at your inbox. Why not a second time, just after you have had your lunch, for example. Then, you treat sequentially all the emails until you reach the zero-inbox. Another way is building yourself a tasks list that you would only start to process after you have finished reading your emails. This way, for each task of the list, you’ll have only one context switch, because you won’t switch before ending the task you are working on. Still better, you will be able to forget it, because it would be complete. Furthermore, when you visit your email inbox, your mind is prepared for this task. It has nothing to keep in mind while you do it. Your mind can serenely process each mail and jump into its context. The task is performed, and then forgotten. The processing becomes more efficient, less tiring and less stressing.
It seems a little bit too ideal. What about emergencies?
Ask always yourself whether an emergency is really an emergency. Many of them are not real. And for others, would you send a paper mail to firemen to signal there is a fire somewhere? In these rare cases, prefer a synchronous interaction: talk directly or use your phone. But be conscious that such an action will occur a context switch for your conversation partner.
