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The cost of email interruption
Abstract
The use of email by employees at the Danwood Group was studied and it was found that the interrupt effect from emails is more than generally believed. Employees allowed themselves to be interrupted almost as frequently as telephone calls and the common reaction to the arrival of an email is to react almost as quickly as they would respond to telephone calls. This means the interrupt effect is comparable with that of a telephone call. The recovery time from an email interruption was found to be significantly less than the published recovery time for telephone calls. It is to be concluded, therefore, that while Email is still less disruptive than the telephone, the way the majority of users handle their incoming email has been shown to give far more interruption than expected. By analysing the data captured the authors have been able to create recommendations for a set of guidelines for email usage within the workplace that will increase employee efficiency by reducing the prominence of interruptions, restricting the use of email-to-all messages, setting-up the email application to display three lines of the email and to check for email less frequently. It is recommended that training should be given to staff on how to use email more effectively to increase employee productivity.
... Stimuli congestion does not lead not only to procrastination but what is more it leads to decreasing work efficiency and in final account to financial losses. Jackson et al. (2001) describe that email messages do have some disruptive effect by interrupting the user -more than is generally assumed. Approximately every five minutes an average office worker gets an email. ...
... Compared to common opinion that workers will read the emails in his free time (DeMarco T. and Lister T. 1999), in actual fact they read en email in six seconds after mail announcing. In comparison to the telephone call recovery time for email is just a little over a minute while for telephone it is nearly 15 minutes (Jackson et al. 2000) But when taking into account the amount of incoming emails and the incoming frequency, one minute recovery time will be significant when accumulated over a whole day (Jackson et al., 2001). ...
The population ageing and the employment of older workers is one of the most discussed issues of recent times. But who is the older employee? What determines the difference between whether a worker is still young or already belongs to the category of older employees? The employment of older people is associated with a number of stereotypes. The aim of the paper is to evaluate respondents' view of who is an older employee. Respondents were asked what are the factors based on which they consider a person as an older. The aobtained data are processed through a grounded theory method. The research sample consists of 520 respondents who are divided into 3 age groups. The results of a questionnaire survey of ageing factors are discussed.
... These interruptions come at a cost. After responding to an email, re-engaging in a primary task can take up to 15 min (Jackson 2001) and answering emails during face-to-face meetings is common (Dennis 2021). Undue focus on email may orientate an employee's efforts towards work that is urgent rather than work that is important (Cooke 2010). ...
Email is a major means of communication in healthcare and it facilitates the fast delivery of messages and information. But email's ubiquity has brought challenges. It has changed the way we get things done, and working days can be dictated by the receipt and reply of multiple email messages, which drown out other priorities. This article examines email's advantages and disadvantages and, with a focus on healthcare professionals, examines what individuals and organisations can do to ensure email works for us, rather than – as can seem the case – the other way around.
... Because it is so common, researchers have extensively studied and conceptualized interruption throughout the history of psychology. Interruption has been elaborated within various contexts such as memory [2][3][4], recovery of attention [5][6][7], learning [8], emotion [9], motivation [10], organizational behavior [11,12], and so on. Some notable studies have found that interruption promotes better recall [2], creates a tendency or urge to return to the unfinished task [13], produces emotional behaviors [9,14,15], can evoke anxiety [12,14,16], or even spark positive feelings [12,17]. ...
Interruptions are a part of our everyday lives. They are inevitable in complex societies, especially when many people move from one place to another as a part of their daily routines. The main aim of this research is to understand the effects of interruptions on individuals from a psychological and crowd dynamics perspective. Two studies were conducted to investigate this issue, with each focusing on different types of interruptions and examining their psychological (emotion, motivation, arousal) and physiological (heart rate) components. Study 1 examined interruptions in a video game setting and systematically varied goal proximity (N = 61). It was hypothesized that being interrupted in the later stages of goal pursuit would create a high aroused impatience state, while interruptions in the earlier stages would produce a low aroused boredom state. However, the results showed that the hypothesized groupwise differences were not observed. Instead, interruptions created annoyance in all conditions, both psychologically and physiologically. Study 2 investigated interruptions in pedestrian crowds (N = 301) and used a basic motivational dichotomy of high and low motivation. In the experiments, crowds (80–100 participants) were asked to imagine that they were entering a concert hall consisting of a narrow bottleneck. The low motivation group reported feeling bored during the interruption, while the high motivation group reported feeling impatient. Additionally, a motivational decrease was observed for the high motivation group due to the interruption. This drop in motivation after the interruption is also reflected in the measured density (person/m²) in front of the bottleneck. Overall, both studies showed that interruption can have significant effects on individuals, including psychological and physiological impacts. The observed motivational decrease through interruption is particularly relevant for crowd management, but further investigation is needed to understand the context-specific effects of interruptions.
... When interruptions are caused by, or attributable to the use of technology (e.g., e-mail notifications), research refers to them as interruptions that are induced by technology [45]. While common technologies, such as phone calls or e-mails, can interrupt office workers up to 70 times a day [46,47], they lose a third of their workday as a result [48,49]. Therefore, interruptions are mostly considered as negative events which can impair the performance of work activities [50] by reducing productivity, adding load due to additional tasks, or disrupting ongoing work processes [51]. ...
The digital transformation of work has long since arrived in our everyday lives. The crisis-driven digital transformation through COVID-19 undoubtedly accelerated many things and acted as a burning glass for processes that had not yet been digitally transformed. This dissertation is dedicated to the fundamental digital transformation of work and, with a total of fifteen research studies, to the framework of the crisis-driven digital transformation of work, among others. With reference to the framework concepts of "Transformation Governance", "Digital Leadership" and "Future Technology Management", approaches are identified on how to close the theoretical and practical gap regarding the digital transformation of work.
Organizational, individual, and technical approaches are identified as prerequisites for the successful digital transformation of work. The findings will enable future research to investigate current and emerging phenomena, such as issues of collaboration in virtual realities and fostering cohesion in purely virtual teams. Methodologically, established approaches such as interviews, case studies, surveys, experimental and mixed methods approaches are combined. Therefore, the dissertation can provide a starting point for discussion, but also for further research in the field of business informatics and in other disciplines. Furthermore, this work provides valuable insights and recommendations for action for experts, especially in SMEs, who want to face the digital transformation.
Organizations often send bulk emails to employees to make them aware of policy changes, organization plans, and events. Many of these emails, however, are long digests with many separate messages that waste employees' time and reduce their awareness. This study introduces CommTool--a prototype tool to help organizational communicators better understand their emails' performance and cost. We first interviewed 5 communicators and identified the need to measure the performance of each message within bulk email. Then we iteratively designed and deployed an organizational bulk email evaluation platform (CommTool), which enables communicators to get diverse message-level metrics such as reading time, relevance rate, comments, etc. We evaluated these designs through a 2-month field deployment with 5 communicators and 149 organization employees. We found that 1) the message-level metrics, such as reading time and relevance rate, helped communicators understand their audience and design bulk emails; 2) the cost and reputation metrics did not influence the organization leaders' decisions. We summarize with suggestions on designing organizational bulk email evaluation platforms that provide message-level performance and cost information.
Bulk email is widely used in organizations to communicate messages to employees. It is an important tool in making employees aware of policies, events, leadership updates, etc. However, in large organizations, the problem of overwhelming communication is widespread. Ineffective organizational bulk emails waste employees' time and organizations' money, and cause a lack of awareness or compliance with organizations' missions and priorities. This thesis focuses on improving organizational bulk email systems by 1) conducting qualitative research to understand different stakeholders; 2) conducting field studies to evaluate personalization's effects on getting employees to read bulk messages; 3) designing tools to support communicators in evaluating bulk emails. We performed these studies at the University of Minnesota, interviewing 25 employees (both senders and recipients), and including 317 participants in total. We found that the university's current bulk email system is ineffective as only 22% of the information communicated was retained by employees. To encourage employees to read high-level information, we implemented a multi-stakeholder personalization framework that mixed important-to-organization messages with employee-preferred messages and improved the studied bulk email's recognition rate by 20%. On the sender side, we iteratively designed a prototype of a bulk email evaluation platform. In field evaluation, we found bulk emails' message-level performance helped communicators in designing bulk emails. We collected eye-tracking data and developed a neural network technique to estimate how much time each message is being read using recipients' interactions with browsers only, which improved the estimation accuracy to 73%. In summary, this work sheds light on how to design organizational bulk email systems that communicate effectively and respect different stakeholders' value.
Worldwide, governments have introduced novel information and communication technologies (ICTs) for policy formulation and service delivery, radically changing the working environment of government employees. Following the debate on work stress and particularly on technostress, we argue that the use of ICTs triggers “digital overload” that decreases government employees’ job satisfaction via inhibiting their job autonomy. Contrary to prior research, we consider job autonomy as a consequence rather than a determinant of digital overload, because ICT-use accelerates work routines and interruptions and eventually diminishes employees’ freedom to decide how to work. Based on novel survey data from government employees in Germany, Italy, and Norway, our structural equation modeling (SEM) confirms a significant negative effect of digital overload on job autonomy. More importantly, job autonomy partially mediates the negative relationship between digital overload and job satisfaction, pointing to the importance of studying the micro-foundations of ICT-use in the public sector.
Individuals experience a greater frequency of interruptions than ever before. Interruptions by e-mails, phone calls, texts and other sources of disruption are ubiquitous. We examine the important unanswered question of whether interruptions can increase the likelihood that individuals will choose closure-associated behaviors. Specifically, we explore the possibility that interruptions that occur during the climactic moments of a task or activity can produce a heightened need for psychological closure. When an interruption prevents individuals from achieving closure in the interrupted domain, we show that the resulting unsatisfied need for psychological closure can cause individuals to seek closure in totally unrelated domains. These findings have important implications for understanding how consumer decisions may be influenced by the dynamic – and often interrupted — course of daily events.
Technological developments have increased the opportunity for interleaving between tasks, leading to more interruptions and more choices for users. Three experiments tested the interleaving strategies of users completing simple office-based tasks while adjusting access control privileges to documents. Previous work predicted users would switch tasks to enable them to work on the task that produced the greatest current benefit—they would maximise the marginal rate of return. Results found that by interleaving between tasks users were able to focus on shorter tasks and that the interleaving decisions were consistent with a strategy of maximising the marginal rate of return. However, interruptions from access control tasks disrupted the processing involved in this task management and led to errors in task selection (Experiment 2) and task performance (Experiment 3). Task interleaving can therefore have costs in security contexts where errors can be catastrophic. Understanding which strategies maximise the marginal rate of return could predict users’ task management behaviour.
Research on email overload has mainly focused on email-related predictors and on linking it to stress and productivity. However, only few studies have considered personality traits to explain email overload and no studies to date have examined burnout and work engagement as potential consequences. Hence, this study was conducted (N = 201) to test to which extent Core Self-Evaluations, the Big Five traits and ambition predict email overload beyond email-related predictors. Moreover, the relationship between email overload and burnout/work engagement was examined. Results show that Core Self-Evaluations predict email overload beyond other personality traits and email-related measures. Second, high feelings of email overload and low Core Self-Evaluations are suggested to contribute to higher levels of burnout and low work engagement, beyond other personality traits and control variables. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. This study demonstrated the importance of personality, in particular of Core Self-Evaluations, to explain email overload. Moreover, it strongly indicates that email overload is not only related to productivity but also to burnout and work engagement.
Lectures are designed to deliver new information to a large group of students. Apart from actual lecturing, lecturers may also encourage elaboration of learning material with advanced instructions, like advance organizer, summaries and repetitions as well as questions. Prerequisite to learning from lectures is that students focus on the lecture and cognitively process what is being presented. In today’s lectures, mobile devices, (i.e. laptops and smartphones), may aid students to research additional information online or to take notes, but may also distract students. In this descriptive study, 86 students with 91 mobile devices out of five lectures were observed with respect to how they utilized mobile devices for lecture-related and -unrelated activities. Additionally, we observed 21 lecturers and coded their behavior. The results indicate that lecturing correlates only slightly with student activities. Students use media mostly in a lecture-unrelated way. Giving negative feedback seems to foster students’ lecture-unrelated media use.
The influx of technology into the classroom presents a serious challenge for educators and researchers. One of the greatest challenges is to better understand, given our knowledge of the demands of dual tasking, how the distraction posed by this technology influences educational outcomes. In the present investigation we explore the impact of engaging in computer mediated non-lecture related activities (e.g., email, surfing the web) during a lecture on attention to, and retention of, lecture material. We test a number of predictions derived from existing research on dual tasking. Results demonstrate a significant cost of engaging in computer mediated non-lecture related activities to both attention and retention of lecture material, a reduction in the frequency of mind wandering during the lecture, and evidence for difficulty coordinating attention in lectures with distractions present. Discussion focuses on the theoretical and practical implications of these results for dividing attention in the classroom.