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Switch off email for a happier life

8th May 2012

Bing-bong – here comes another email. Most people have constant reminders that email has arrived. Whether it is the familiar bing-bing sound, the little pop-up alerts at the bottom of your computer screen, or buzzes on your smartphone, email is omnipresent. Most people it seems also keep their email window open all day, whether in a separate application or a tab in their browser if they use webmail services like Gmail. But new research confirms earlier studies which suggest this could be harmful to your health.

You have new mail

Being constantly interrupted by email is stressful because you feel a lack of control. Being unable to control our own life is a significant trigger for stress. And when you are stressed you produce hormones which long-term have a negative impact on your body, ultimately causing organ damage if they are present in excess for any length of time.

New research now adds to this knowledge by showing that when you have email “always on” you tend to multi-task much more, with people switching activities from work to email around 37 times an hour if they have an email window constantly open. Such people are in a state of “high alert” as a result and these new findings show that their heart rates are constantly higher too. Constant, fast heart rates are not good for you – they are linked to heart damage.

Furthermore, the constant switching between windows is actually less productive. Your brain cannot accommodate the constant change in focus as easily as we might think. As a result, we have to keep going back to emails to do things again – doubling up on work and ultimately taking longer to do things. Keeping an email window constantly open actually reduces productivity.

The new research also undertook an interesting piece of analysis. The researchers gave people an “email holiday” where they did not look at emails for five days. These individuals had heart rates which were returned to normal and reported that they were much happier. Their stress levels were much lower.

Not only that, but when people were given an email holiday they became MORE productive being able to focus more on their real work.

Having “always on” email is an illusion. You think you are more productive, when in fact you are less efficient and effective. Not only that, you are more stressed and doing your body harm.

Here’s what to do to INCREASE productivity and REDUCE STRESS:

  1. Only open your email program when YOU want to send or answer emails
  2. Switch off all alerts to new incoming emails
  3. Set aside times of the day when you will deal with emails – a couple of times a day is enough
  4. Ensure you have an email processing system in place. Emails will fall into one of three categories: for deletion, for immediate answering, for answering later.
  5. Have an email filing system- your inbox should ALWAYS BE EMPTY once you have completed your email activities

Ultimately your aim should be for you to control email, not the other way around. Your health depends on that.

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Email is increasingly liked for business purposes

12th April 2012

People are starting to divide communications systems into “personal”, “private” and “business”. Increasing amounts of research shows that email is losing its popularity as a personal communications vehicle. Instead, people are mainly using Facebook and Twitter as the means of keeping in touch with friends and family. And then if the information is really private then text messages are the preferred method.

What is interesting, however, is the fact that over three quarters of people in recent studies want to hear from businesses and brands they like BUT via email instead of any other means. Indeed, email is more popular as a means of keeping in touch with businesses than all of the other communications methods added together.

Email is the preferred way to hear from business

This means if you are neglecting email marketing you are missing out on the NUMBER ONE way of keeping in touch with your customers. It is THE way they want you to contact them.

Yet, all I hear when I visit businesses is “Email is dead, people are giving up on email aren’t they?” This is the land of assumption. All the evidence suggests that email is becoming increasingly important to businesses. Only today I was reviewing the success of an online campaign for a website.  Only 10% of the sales had come via social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on. Twitter, alone, had brought over a third of the traffic to the website – yet no-one who came via that route actually bought the item. The vast majority of the sales had actually come from two email campaigns. Hours of Tweeting, writing on Facebook and adding to LinkedIn discussions had brought the website a lot of attention and a great deal of traffic. But almost none of that traffic was converted into purchasers. Instead, email was the main way in which people were turned from being interested, to being buyers.

This could well be due to the fact that people are changing the reasons they use email. With increasing numbers of people using email as their preferred method of receiving information from businesses this means they are already in “business mode” ways of thinking when they are using their email system. That means you are more likely to get a sale, because the people receiving your email are already partially in a buying frame of mind.

But when they are on Twitter or Facebook, for instance, they are in a personal frame of mind – which means that if they see your Tweet or message and are interested they may well click through but are less likely to buy because they are not fully in “buying mode”.

Essentially, if you are not focusing your online marketing methods on email, you are missing out – big time.

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Email stops you sleeping

2nd April 2012

Sleeping on a laptopThe numbers of people with problems sleeping is increasing. Indeed, according to recent research one-in-three of us no longer have a proper night of sleep, with millions of people now “managing” on just five hours per night. Doctors are seeing increasing numbers of individuals with sleep disturbances too. So the nagging question which the experts want to answers is “why are sleep problems increasing”?

Our modern, very busy lifestyle is thought to be responsible. In fact, the world does not “switch off” – 24 hour TV and the constant updating of the Internet mean that life is “on the go” the whole time. That makes some of us think we might miss something if we sleep. It also means that there is no standard “bed time”. Years ago, TV “went to bed”, finishing late at night with “the epilogue” and then “close down”. You were forced to go to be because there was nothing to watch. Even radio stopped, to let us get some rest. But for decades now we have been able to have the radio on all night and watch TV if we wanted.

Now, with on-demand video technologies we can even “go to the movies” at 3am if we want. And if you run out of milk or bread at 4am, goodness me that’s not an issue either because you can nip out to a whole array of 24 hour shops. Whatever you want throughout the night, you can get it.

Added to this, we are surrounded by more light than ever before. Our brains prepare us for sleep and produce the hormones necessary for a good night’s rest by monitoring the amount of light around us. As things get darker, our brains kick in the sleep arrangements necessary. But as you sit facing your computer late at night, your brain still thinks it has plenty of daylight because the screen is pouring light into your eyes. As a result our brains are fooled into believing it isn’t time yet to go to sleep.

Experts also believe our attitudes are important and chief amongst these is the way we think about email. Checking emails just before you go to bed is one of the principal reasons why we suffer sleep disturbances. Also, if you look at Facebook or Twitter late at night, that too can cause difficulties.

When you look at your messages just before going to bed a few things happen. Firstly, you activate your mind to make it start thinking again – when actually what you need for a good sleep is a rested mind. But you also trigger subconscious activity which prevents you from sleeping – such as reactions to negative emails. If, for instance, you get an email late at night making some kind of complaint or comment about your work, what can you do about it anyway? So, what was the purpose of reading it? Such emails could wait until the next working day.

It is not necessary to check your emails constantly and to be “always available”. Research shows that for large companies most consumers expect a reply to their emails within an hour or two during the working day. But in general terms, most of us are happy if we get a reply within 24 hours. So if someone emails you late at night they are not expecting a reply from you until the next day anyway. Hence there is no need to read it.

So how can you manage email and stop it from contributing to loss of sleep?

Get an empty inbox
The first step is to have an email “strategy”. Largely this means switching OFF the automatic checking of emails by your software. Instead, have regular times of the day when you log in and deal with your emails then – and only then. Many people find that first thing in the morning and then late in the afternoon is perfectly adequate. Indeed, there are some highly successful people who check emails once a day – and that is all. If something comes in after that, it has to wait until the following morning. Having an email checking routine is going to help you sleep much better than an “always on” email program.

Also, use your email program to categorise emails so that you know what to do. For instance, you can have “folders” labelled “Today” and “Later”. When you check your emails, any that need a reply today can be transferred to that folder. Anything else which is less time-dependent can be put in the “Later” folder for you to deal with when you get a spare few moments. Each time you log in to your email you will face less of a sense of pressure to deal with things.

Ultimately you should aim for an EMPTY INBOX. As emails come in you make a decision what to do with them – most can be trashed straight away and the others either need dealing with “today” or “later”. Move them into the relevant folders and then spend your time on the “today” folder. When you check your emails last thing in the afternoon, handle the last few emails in the “today” box and you then can retire for the evening safe in the knowledge you have done everything you needed to. Sleep will be easy.

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Believe me, this is true – people lie online

17th November 2011

LiarTom Crone, the lawyer from News International is adamant he is telling the truth about the News of the World phone hacking scandal. But the company boss, James Murdoch, is also insistent that he is telling the truth too. Considering that these two powerful men are giving rather different versions of the same events it seems that something fishy is going on..!

The chances are you can spot when you are being lied to. You don’t need to hold an investigation, neither do you need to get in a lie-detector machine – usually your gut instinct will let you know – instantly – that you are not being told the truth. Things like vocal performance change when we lie – the frequency of sound often goes up. So when someone is speaking to you and then suddenly their vocal frequency rises you interpret that as the fact they are possibly being misleading. We work that out when we are babies. Just listen to someone having a “chat” with an infant – apart from the coo chi-coos when we speak with babies our vocal frequency goes up quite a bit. However, when we do that we are often not telling the truth to the child. We talk all sorts of nonsense. Then, as they start to understand, we get more serious and our vocal frequency goes down. It’s a signal to the growing child that true stuff is associated with a lower register. When we lie, we get nervous, our vocal chords tighten and the frequency of sound goes up – which we interpret as a fib, thanks to our development.

In addition to vocal changes, there are micro-muscular changes which occur in our face; we are adept at spotting them and as a result we can easily detect a liar. You do it every day – someone says something to you and you spot those vocal frequency changes and the tiny movements in their face and you suspect that what you are being told is not completely true. Human beings are good at spotting liars.

However, here’s the problem – we need to be in front of people to detect those non-verbal signals of fibbing. If someone isn’t even present in the same room as you, but merely communicating via text message, or on Twitter, how do you tell who is truthful?

A few research studies have shown that when we complete online forms and profile information in social networks we tend to be more honest than when we do the same in print. We lie less readily in our online CVs than in the ones we type up it seems. And according to new research from the University of Massachusetts suggests that when we are online on things like Twitter we are less prone to lying than in other forms of digital communication. What the study shows is the fact that we are more likely to lie when the communication is “asynchronous” – when writing and reading are at different times. When communication is simultaneous, as in social media exchanges we are less likely to lie – though, just as in the real world, we do tell porkers.

The research shows that the place you are most likely to be lied to online is in emails. The time lag between writing and reading is often so great that it makes us more tempted to lie, it seems.

What can you do about it? The answer is easy. Don’t write emails as though you were typing a report. Write your emails “out loud” – talk them through, as though you were facing the individual, one-on-one, face-to-face. It will put you in a different frame of mind and will set you up psychologically for “speaking” to the individual, rather than writing to them. That will inevitably make you more honest as your brain will start to interpret the communication as synchronous. Not only that, writing emails as though you are speaking also makes them easier to understand because they will be written better, avoiding flowery language, jargon and nonsense non-words, symbols and “smilies”. In other words, you boost your communication at the same time as making yourself more honest.

I wonder what the emails between Crone and Murdoch are like…?

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Email users are more intelligent

17th October 2011

Email makes you popularHate your inbox? Think again. All that emailing you do could be doing two things for you. According to a small study of Australian schoolchildren, email makes you more intelligent and increases your popularity at the same time. The research found that boys in particular were more popular the more emailing they did. Plus, their cognitive abilities were higher. So, at first sight, it seems that email makes you more intelligent.

But this study is a lovely example of chicken and egg. Are the pupils more intelligent because they are using email, or are they using email more because they are more intelligent? Sadly, the study wasn’t designed to answer that type of question. What it did show was that individuals who use email are deemed to be more popular by their peers. The researchers related this finding to older studies with school lunch boxes. If a child had the “right” lunch box, with the in-vogue cartoon character on the front, they were deemed to be popular. In other words, “follow the pack” and people like you.

This has important implications for your online business. The “pack” at the moment is busy doing Twitter and Facebook. If you are not, you face psychological exclusion rather like the child with the wrong lunch box. It may be hard for you to find a business case to justify constant Tweeting, but to be “out of line” is something that is hard to measure and does not appear on your balance sheet anyway. But affect your balance sheet it will. Companies that go out of favour struggle to win back their custom. What this study demonstrates is how easy it actually is to stay in favour.

Besides which, by using the latest technologies it may well be you increase your intelligence and your cognitive abilities.

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