Email - A Dangerous Distraction?
September 11th, 2008 by ComputerBob
Back in the early-to-mid nineties, I was a computer consultant to a multinational corporation. Even though I was one of only two men who wore a ponytail in that extremely conservative atmosphere — the other was a native American — I fit in really well there for several years.
But one thing about that company’s culture really bothered me: Everyone checked their email at 7:45 every morning. That in itself wasn’t a bad thing, other than it slowed the email servers way down for about 15 minutes every morning. The bad thing was that hardly anyone checked their email at any other time of the day.
In other words, if you sent an email message to someone at 8:30 in the morning, there was a very good chance that they weren’t going to even see it until 7:45 the following morning. And if they needed to forward it to someone else for input or approval, it would take another 24 hours before that other person would see it. And another 24 hours before the person that you had originally written to would look at their reply.
As you can imagine, that made it very frustrating for those of us in IT who often needed answers to our emails before we could do parts of our jobs.
I’m sure you’re thinking, “Why didn’t you just call them on the phone?”
Well, if you’ve ever worked in IT, you know that it’s very important to cover your butt by keeping careful records of your communications, especially those with your superiors.
But the main reason that telephone calls weren’t really an option was because the same people who only checked their email once every day also never answered their telephones directly. Even if they were sitting right next to it, they would let it ring until it went to voice mail. Then they’d pick up their voice mail messages and decide whether or not they wanted to call you back.
And if you were asking them to make a decision about something, you knew that they weren’t going to call you back.
With their email and telephone firewalls securely in place, I’m guessing that many of those employees successfully kept their desks nice and clean, free from annoying, distracting tasks like their job duties.
Nowdays, many organizations are suffering from the opposite kind of problem. The results of a recent study imply that email can become a dangerous distraction.
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