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# Why E-Mail is Failing Us
- URL: https://onemanandhisblog.com/2008/10/why_email_is_failing_us/
- Published: 2008-10-22T15:06:58.000Z
- Updated: 2015-04-28T14:31:11.000Z
- Author: Adam Tinworth
- Tags: Blogs, chat, collaboration, e-mail, information overload, instant messenging, productivity, w2eb, wikis

E-mail. No-one thinks of it as a social app. It’s hardly what we think of as Web 2.0, yet it’s the most social piece of software most of us use each day.

Oh, and it’s broken.

[![Suw Charman-Anderson](https://i1.wp.com/www.onemanandhisblog.com/content/images/2008/10/CRW_7400-Version-2-thumb-250x376.jpg?resize=250%2C376)](https://i2.wp.com/www.computerweekly.com/blogs/enterprise-social-software/pics/2008/CRW%5F7400%20-%20Version%202.jpg?ref=onemanandhisblog.com)That, at least, was what [Suw Charman-Anderson](http://suw.org.uk/?ref=onemanandhisblog.com) suggested at one of the keynote sessions of the [Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin](http://en.oreilly.com/webexberlin2008/?ref=onemanandhisblog.com) today.

She pointed out that e-mail has gone from something you needed a business case for a decade ago, to the first thing you get in a new job. And that’s creating a problem:

• 13% of people are getting more than 250 e-mails per day  
• 56% of people think they’re spending too long on e-mail.  
  
The reality is worse than that, she suggested, because we tend to underestimate our e-mail use.

The fundamental problem is that e-mail alerts interrupt us – there’s a cost to that.

It takes us ~~1m 44 secs~~ 64 seconds to get our train of thought back after we deal with e-mail. \*(The 1m 44s figure is for how long we take to process the alert. Thanks for the correction, Suw) \*We can’t afford to spend a day a week figuring our what we were doing.

Psychologist have a term that describes our relationship with e-mail: [operant conditioning](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant%5Fconditioning?ref=onemanandhisblog.com) – when we check e-mail, sometimes we get a nice one.That starts to create an emotional relationship with checking e-mail. Scientists explore the idea by feeding rats when they press levers. Rats will press a lever five times, if that’s how often it takes to get food. But they get obsessed with lever-pushing when the food reward is random. That’s exactly relationship we have with e-mail. We keep checking it, in the hope that an emotionally-boosting one will come through.

Coupled with that, e-mail has become a proxy for work. Web working makes it difficult to judge how productive people are. If send lots of e-mail, *clearly* they’re doing lots of work – or so goes the thinking.

Together, these responses are rapidly eroding our productivity. So what’s the solution? You need to thhink about other ways of doing the same tasks – but with different tools.

**Document collaboration** – doing this via e-mail, and merging it all at the end is one of the most soul-destroying ways of doing it. Using wikis is easier.

**Sharing Information** – Don’t e-mail it. Publishing blogs and make sure everyone uses RSS. There need to be RSS readers for everyone in the company – a step that is often forgotten.

**Short Conversations** – use IM and chat for instant communication. E-mail makes conversations go on too long, as everyone feels need to be polite. IM conversations tend to be quick and to-the-point.

\*You can read a summary of a more detailed version of Suw’s talk \[at her site\](http://suw.org.uk/2008/10/02/the-email-problem/).\*