Email: The Productivity Killer

Was I asleep? Did I miss something? I was under the impression that email was something you sent when you wanted to communicate something that was good to know, or needed an answer, but didn't need your direct attention or immediate response this second. If it was something really important, you flagged it as urgent.

But suddenly, every email we send has become a ticking time bomb that has to be answered right now, this very second.

God help you if you don't.

We've got people who send emails, and wait anxiously, huddled over their keyboards, waiting for their response. If they don't get one within a few minutes, they pick up the phone or open an IM window and ask, "Did you get my email? Did you read it?" If you dare answer in the affirmative, they ask you why you didn't respond. If it was that urgent, why didn't you just call? 

We've become a society that hinges on instant communication, leaving instant message services open, cell phones on 24/7, and email applications open and minimized so we know the very second we get an email.

But here's the skinny of it: the vast majority of the email we receive is unimportant garbage. And yet, Microsoft Outlook feels utterly compelled to give me a nice little notification every time I get an email from someone who wants to tell me there's leftover cake in the coffee area, that I can get a lower rate on my mortgage, or that some obscure fellow from offshore wants me to engage in a money-laundering scheme with him.

That kind of distraction is a major productivity killer. It's every bit as bad as an instant message window popping up from your mom, telling you that the cat puked on the kitchen floor.

Why? Because it breaks your concentration, and usually at really critical moments when you've got your groove on.

Face it: You don't really need to know those things. Microsoft Outlook shouldn't alert you to every email that you should receive. It should alert you to those marked urgent or flagged with a read-receipt, and then, only those from people on your approved senders list (usually, your contact list or the Exchange server). But no, that might actually make sense.

I came into work today and decided to conduct an experiment. I'm normally distracted by a ton of little things that I am certain are the primary killers of my productivity. They usually boil down to three things: email, instant messenger, and the compulsive urge to browse the Web. So I set out to eliminate those things. I shut down my instant messaging applications. I checked my mail once, and then exited the application. I didn't minimize it, I closed it.

Then, instead of leaving the defect tracking software open in a browser all day, where I'm tempted to keep checking my feeds and peruse Digg, I exported the list of defects to Excel, and then closed the browser. I then kept the browser closed all morning.

I've gotten more work done this morning than I have in the past two days. Why? Because I can concentrate. My train of thought isn't constantly being derailed by instant messages, email notifications, and that highly tempting little bookmark that mocks me on my Firefox Live Bookmarks toolbar.

These kinds of things are serious productivity killers. They simply pull me away from what I should be doing. So you can bet that I'll be seriously mitigating their impact on my work life in the future. It's a sad fact that in our world, we can't escape them because they've become so entrenched in the way that we work and live.

But, I'll set aside specific times to check my mail each day (first thing in the morning, lunch time, and right before I go home). Instant Messaging software is out. And I'll significantly reduce my use of the browser, constraining myself to those uses for which it was intended.

Maybe, if I do those things, and am able to get my work done at the office, I won't have to take my work home. You know, where there's a completely different set of distractions.

Fighting Fire with Fire

Today, yet again, someone sent me a chain letter in my email.

I loathe chain letters. I've blogged about them. They're evil. They're vile. They're a waste of time. They clog up mailboxes. They make impossible promises and fill your head with touchy-feely nonsense. I'm sick of receiving them, and I think it's rude and impolite of folks to send them around to their friends out of some superstitious and selfish sense that they're going to improve their own wellbeing. And yet, my cries to have people stop sending them to me have gone unheard, unheeded. I am still receiving them. And I have noticed that the recipient lists only seem to be getting larger.

So I've capitulated. But I've decided to do it with a twist.

Every time someone sends me one of these damned things, I'm going to send them a link to my blog post about chain letters. And I'm going to CC everyone on the list.

So now, admittedly, I've become a hypocrite. But only for a short time. When I'm satisfied they've gotten the message, I'll stop. Until them, it's on, baby. Bring it!

The Evil Wiles of the Chain Letter

My mother recently got a chain letter in her email, and was telling me how she hates it when people send them to her. Certain friends and family members are notorious for forwarding them us, and it really peeves us off, because they're a complete waste of our time. We simply delete them these days. Unfortunately, in many cases, you have to open the email before you can determine whether or not its a chain letter. And by the time you've opened it, you feel utterly compelled to finish reading it. It's like a hypnotic effect.

Once you've opened a chain letter, it's contents are like road kill: you have to look. You can't help it. You don't want to look, but you have to. Your brain screams, "It's not right! Turn the other way! Close your eyes!" But your eyes stare fixedly at it while your mouth drops open in horror and bile rises at the back of your throat. When you've finished reading it, you're left with that feeling that you just got ripped off, like you paid to see Saving Private Ryan and instead got something on the order of Killer Beach Bimbos from Outer Space.

Chain letters have even moved away from the email format and evolved into MySpace comments. (I haven't checked out sites like TagWorld or any of MySpace's competitors, so I can't really comment on that.) Fortunately, MySpace comments are easily ignored. You can just customize the page to not display them.

Now, chain letters pose a number of problems, as I see it:

1. They waste the recipient's time. No one that I know likes to waste time reading them. I'd guess that those who do are also those who like to forward them, thereby propagating them and contributing to the misery of those who don't want to get them in the first place.

2. They clog up mailboxes. Most users have a finite amount of space in their mailboxes. When your mail box runs out of space on the mail server, the mail server refuses to accept mail for you until you start clearing out your mailbox. If your mailbox is full of spam, that tends to tick you off. No one wants to waste a limited amount of space on email that serves no purpose and that they'll just delete anyway. This is especially problematic if the chain letter includes images, audio, or video attachments.

3. They tend to contain deeply nested attachments. Because they are forwarded so many times, and due to the way that many email programs forward emails, the message is forwarded as an attachment: its text is not included in the body. This forces the user to open the attachment in order to read the message, which is often a risky proposition these days, since many casual users either don't use virus software or don't keep it up to date. However, every time the message is forwarded, the message is sent as an attachment, with a new message wrapper. So the new recipients have one more layer to click through in order to get to the actual message. By the time it's been sent ten or twenty times, which happens quite frequently, the real message is so deeply embedded in nested attachments that it's a chore to reach it. This is a highly annoying aspect of these messages, and it wastes lots of time.

   The fact that the messages are included as message headers also bloats the size of the email itself. Instead of simply including the text of the body, and using a single mail header, the email is sent as a file attachment, with the complete email header plus the complete email header for the new email. Now if I send it again, I get to create an email that contains a new email header, plus a new file attachment that contains the email header and text for the email I received plus the original attachment. The file's just gotten much larger. When my recipient forwards the file, it will get larger again. This causes the chain letter's overall size when sent across the Internet to grow every time it is forwarded.

4. They are propagated by exploiting human weakness. Chain letters aren't sent out by a mindless computer sitting in an air conditioned network operations center. Nor are they sent out by some hacker sitting in a dark room in his mom's basement somewhere. They are sent out by people who get them from their friends, and think they're cute, or touching, or emotionally stirring, and forward them on to their friends. They forward them on to the people that they think are most interested in them. And so, unlike spam, which dies when it hits a user's machine and (hopefully) goes to his or her recycle bin or junk email folder, the user keeps the chain letter alive by sharing it with his or her friends and coworkers. Further, the user sends it to multiple individuals, and those individuals do the same. So the chain letter is spread like a biological virus.

5. They are nothing more than personal, selective spam. Don't believe me? Dictionary.com defines spam as "unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; junk e-mail." Now here, by "indiscriminately" we mean that the sender of a chain letter thinks that everyone wants to get the same chain letter that he or she did. "If I like it, certainly all of my friends and coworkers want to get it." So what does that mean, exactly?

   It means that the sender is distributing spam, knowingly and willingly, albeit naïvely. People have been sent to jail and fined for that because it's illegal in certain states. Why is it illegal? Because it annoys users, and wastes bandwidth and the recipients' resources. The biggest reason, however, is that it annoys users. This article shows that the vast majority of people want spam banned simply because it annoys them.

   By definition, spam is not required to be commercial in nature. That means that all those chain letters you get that promise you happiness, the good will of angels, good luck, blessings, prosperity, the love of your life within three days, your wish coming true, the prevention of bad luck, and on and on, are all spam. Most of us just haven't viewed chain letters in that light before.

And those are just the issues I can think of right off the top of my head.

While I'm at it, it isn't just novice users that get sucked into these emails. With address spoofing you can receive an email that looks perfectly legitimate, and you can start clicking on those attachments because it seems perfectly reasonable to do so. I've done it. My mom has done it. My coworkers have done it. You've typically already opened four or five layers before you realize what you've done and think to yourself, "What am I doing? This is obviously junk!"

So please, please, think before you send that next chain letter out. Those promises they make at the bottom of them are untrue. The threats they make are untrue. You control your own destiny, and no email is going to dictate it for you. Do you think that the destiny of the people that to whom you forward the email is going to be changed because you sent it to them?

You aren't helping anyone by forwarding these things. Point of fact, you're likely annoying more people than you're helping.

Do everyone a favor. When you receive a chain letter, delete it immediately. Then contact the person who sent it to you and politely ask them not to send them to you anymore.