
Checking Email Less Often Leads to More Productive Workdays - spking
https://www.studyfinds.org/study-checking-email-less-often-more-productive-workday-managers/
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topicseed
The headline, at least in my head, reads as "being less distracted leads to
more productive workdays".

Mind-blowing discovery.

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edoceo
Do you remember the first time you saw a headline that was basically that?

1997, I'm riding BART to SF, like 20/yr old, reading a similar article in this
rag called Wired.

Wasn't it about Slack last year tho?

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j7ake
How do you infer the direction of causality here? I've noticed that there are
days when I am hyper focused and I don't check my email once.

Other days I am not feeling focussed (or tired) and I end up checking email
often.

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walshemj
I have had to point out to colleagues that I might always check mail when I
come in and again at lunch time.

But if I am engaged in a task I might not look at mail for several hours.

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cascom
you mean not interrupting yourself is better than constantly interrupting?! I
would say pretty much everyone knows this, however until expectations change
around responsiveness, nothing will happen.

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tareqak
Knowing a fact is one thing, but incorporating said fact into your life such
that you live it and reap the rewards is another.

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scholia
Let all your colleagues know that you only ready emails at specific times, eg
start of day, after lunch, end of day (replace with actual hours if possible).

And if there's something urgent inbetween times, they have to call you.

It worked for me ;-)

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Notorious_BLT
I always find it weird when Hacker News gets obsessed with productivity.
Productivity is what employers want, as an employee I couldn't care less if
our open office plan or our heavy use of slack makes me less productive,
that's a problem for my employer to recognize and solve for if they decide
they care.

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diminoten
Why don't you care about your own productivity? Part of the agreement you
struck with your employer is that you provide value, don't you want to provide
that value?

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notfromhere
If you provide value X to an employer for payment Y, they're not going to
increase your payment in proportion to your increase in productivity.
Frequently employers won't give you any additional compensation for increased
productivity. So the game theory really favors workers optimizing the time it
takes to provide value X

~~~
diminoten
The agreement isn't for X, the agreement was for "whatever you can provide".
You don't provide a unit of work, you provide "your brain as applied to the
problems of the company".

Game theory is for the company to fire you and find someone who will honor
their contract...

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notfromhere
Your employer hires you to solve a problem, they don't get rights to unlimited
productivity. You're held to a specific quality/output of work, and as long as
that's satisfactory, you remain employed.

The game theory is to produce enough quality/output to remain employed. An
employee increasing their productivity without increased compensation for said
productivity is a bit of a sucker.

~~~
diminoten
They hire you for whatever they hire you for. If you're hourly, sure what you
said applies. Otherwise, no, they bought your brain.

The game theory is to find the people who believe this, and to get rid of
people who don't.

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yjftsjthsd-h
> Otherwise, no, they bought your brain.

No, they rent some of it. Like a cloud host; you don't own the hardware,
you're timesharing.

> The game theory is to find the people who believe this, and to get rid of
> people who don't.

Companies prefer to hire suckers if they can, yes.

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speedplane
>> The game theory is to find the people who believe this, and to get rid of
people who don't.

> Companies prefer to hire suckers if they can, yes.

Pretty cynical, no? Obviously employers make more money off their employees
than they pay them, otherwise they wouldn't be in business, but that doesn't
make an employee a sucker.

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notfromhere
An employee is definitely a sucker if they indefinitely keep increasing output
without a rise in compensation.

~~~
diminoten
You can't/won't justify a rise in compensation without increasing output
first.

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Agathos
What if I didn't check my email but only because I was trading memes on Slack
all day?

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yjftsjthsd-h
Surely that counts as more productive work day? ;)

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neilv
You can set some email client filter rules that trigger notification for
things you should probably see promptly, and have no notification/indicator by
default. (Or variations on that, like defaulting to notification but
suppressing it for known non-urgent things, and moving lists to folders.)

An alternative thing I've done, when billing time for a client, is to make a
client-specific email account, and only have a email client running for that
account.

Having aggressive spam filter also helps. (Mine, every sender that's not in my
addressbook or from particular domains goes into a junk folder without
notification, which I check at least once a day, but I'm almost never
interrupted by spam.)

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forinti
I would but I can't avoid people who call me to tell me that they have just
sent me an email.

Or worse: people who come by with a piece of paper with the number of the
workflow they just initiated.

I manage to remain civil, but I can't help some sarcasm escaping.

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donatj
From the things I hear about email from people online, I must have really
lucked out to be so sheltered from it.

I've worked for a number of companies in my life, and I now work for a
relatively large corporation - and email has never been a problem. Since
Monday I have received 7 non-automated emails (lots of automated emails,
sorted into folders) and only one of them required action on my part.

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GordonS
I work for a megacorp (~250,000 emloyees) - the level of _spam_ messages it
puts out every day to _all_ employees is honestly just staggering. I guess I
average 7 such emails a _day_ , never mind a week.

Just as bad, is many of them are repeated, over and over again - some every
few days for a while, some every week in perpetuity.

And even worse is that every single company email that goes out is an image.
And I don't mean _contains_ images - the actual email body is a single image
with crappy 90's graphics and rendered text! On the odd occasion where you
want to copy and paste, you're out of luck.

I've got several Exchange rules set up to put them in a "Cruft" folder, but
new ones keep popping up, and every once in a while it catches a "real" email,
so I still need to check it from time to time.

/rant

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JamesBarney
Sure it makes the person who's not checking his emails more productive but
what about the guy waiting on his reply?

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josho
If you are waiting at your desk for a reply and are truly blocked have you
considered getting out of your desk to ask in person or similarly phoning
them?

If you truly aren’t blocked then what’s the problem waiting a few hours?

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yjftsjthsd-h
> If you truly aren’t blocked then what’s the problem waiting a few hours?

Flow, possibly. Interleaving is frequently efficient, but it's not always
best.

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ravenstine
This is the same reason why I hardly participate in Slack and only reply to
non-emergency PMs at my convenience. My job is a lot easier when I can
actually concentrate on a problem, but for some reason our culture doesn't
value enough the state of focus or being in "the zone".

~~~
leetcrew
I do wonder (and I'm not accusing you specifically) how much people conflate
their own productivity with the team's productivity. a particular engineer's
productivity is undoubtedly harmed by interruptions, but you can indirectly
accomplish a lot just by unblocking several junior engineers in an afternoon.
I'm fortunate to work at a company where senior/lead devs get part of the
credit when they facilitate someone else's work.

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thatoneuser
No way. That coworker who spends 40 mins of every hour on email gets way more
done. They're sure of it.

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woile
I found my days much more productive when I close email and slack and I just
check it maybe every some hours

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xfitm3
I'd love to see a comparable study on Slack, I predict there will be a similar
finding.

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booleandilemma
I find I’m most productive when I close Outlook altogether.

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triplee
Sure, I barely check email. Why do I get nothing done?

Oh yeah, Slack.

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ryanstrug
I disagree. It keeps me more engaged.

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fourier_mode
Unless you work as a human tester for an email client.

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spaceheretostay
> “We found that on days when managers reported high email demands, they
> report lower perceived work progress as a result, and in turn engage in
> fewer effective leader behaviors,” says Johnson.

It seems this is largely a disparity in expectations of work. The managers
self-reported feeling like they got less done when replying to more emails.
But isn't supporting their team and being able to rapidly answer questions
often part of a manager's job? And if not, perhaps they are in the wrong role.

I would be more interested in measuring overall team productivity, not just
the manager's self-reported version. I think you might find that the high-
email-throughput teams do get more done with that extra emailing, even if the
manager feels like they have been less productive.

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quanticle
I was about to post something similar. Let's say, as a conservative estimate,
a manager oversees 5 ICs. Let's also assume, generously, that the manager
becomes 50% more productive if he or she doesn't reply to e-mails until the
end of the day. If the "overflow" from that strategy causes the ICs to become
even 5% _less_ productive, the gain in the manager's productivity is more than
wiped out, and the team as a whole is worse off.

A large part of a manager's job is to shield his or her team from e-mails,
Slack messages, and other productivity-sapping interruptions. If a manager is
grading him or herself by their individual productivity, they're doing
management wrong. If an organization is grading its managers by their
individual productivity, rather than whether their teams are meeting their
objectives, the organization is doing management wrong.

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jxcl
What does IC stand for?

~~~
pwinnski
Individual Contributor

