Don't let e-mail run your work life

Is e-mail overload distracting you from more important tasks, like focusing on how to get that promotion you've had your eye on?

A new study suggests the way you approach electronic communication in your life can affect your stress level -- and in turn, your performance -- on the job.


Researchers at Stanford and Boston University have found that it isn't the actual amount of e-mail you get, but what you do with it that matters when it comes to making you feel behind or out of the loop in the workplace.

In a forthcoming article in the journal Organization Science, they say that although people focus on the amount of e-mail they receive at work, what really matters is how much time they spend responding to it.

"People who got stressed out had to spend a lot of time reading it and writing," Stine Grodal, a professor at Boston University's School of Management and one of the study's authors, told CNN.

"The way that it piles up makes us believe that e-mail is the enemy, the thing that is driving us crazy," she said.

The typical corporate user sends and receives roughly 110 e-mail messages a day, and nearly early one-fifth of those messages are unwanted, according to research firm The Radicati Group.
Grodal's study, which tracked the e-mail behavior of workers at a Fortune 500 technology company in the United States, found that if people tweak their habits, they can reduce the workplace anxiety caused by e-mail overload and improve their productivity.

As more professions require constant monitoring of e-mail, the old advice to "just turn it off" just doesn't cut it, she said.

"This is all real work. It's OK to spend an hour a day on e-mail -- it's just something that you have to do. But you can reduce some of the time that you spend," Grodal said.

Filtering technology can help cut down the amount of time spent on keeping inboxes clear, she said. But many people still aren't comfortable using this in a business setting.