Saturday’s NY Times had a story by Matt Richtel about tech companies banding together to combat infoglut, and it describes a workplace environment I’m sure many of you will recognize:
“A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times,” Richtel reports, “and uses instant messaging 77 times, according to one measure by RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer habits. The company, which draws its data from 40,000 people who have tracking software on their computers, found that on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day.”
Of course, the companies are concerned about how to gain back all the productivity lost to web browsing and IM gossiping, but it’s worth considering the benefits you can experience by spending less time checking for new messages. The article mentions the harmful effects of “email apnea” (a term you might remember from February), as well as the growing recognition that “email messages provide an insidious feedback loop.” And that’s not even getting into the shifts in consciousness stemming from long-term Internet acclimation, which Nicholas Carr has everybody talking about this week with his article in The Atlantic.
If the “email-free Friday” proposal seems a little too radical—or ridiculous—for you, one of the better solutions I’ve seen in the last few months is a suggestion in Tim Ferriss‘s The 4-Hour Workweek: Only check your inbox twice a day, say around 11 A.M. and 4 P.M.