The Most Common Drug in the Workplace

 

Does email boost or hinder your performance? It all depends on how you manage it.

 

Email offers countless ways to save time and be more productive, but when we don’t contain it, our attention becomes fragmented. When attention is constantly shifting over to email, our ability to focus on work and perform really suffers.

 

In 2005, a psychiatrist at King’s College in London administered IQ tests to three groups: the first did nothing but perform the IQ test, the second was distracted by email and ringing phones, and the third was stoned on marijuana. Not surprisingly, the first group did better than the other two by an average of 10 points. The emailers, on the other hands, did worse than intoxicated people by an average of 6 points.[1]

 

Yet, in a recent survey of 320 professionals, 17% check a few times per hour and 68% check email more or less continually – constantly breaking their focus on the primary task at hand.

 

There’s a very good reason that “crackberry” was declared the 2006 Word-of-the-Year by Webster’s New World College Dictionary. Blackberry addiction has become a cultural phenomenon.

 

For a list of 13 strategies to optimize your email usage, and to read the rest of my recent article on this, click here.

 

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[1] Source: “Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” New York Magazine, Dec. 4, 2006