Back in the early 1990s, email was a privilege granted only to those who could prove they needed it. Now, it has turned into a nuisance that's costing companies millions. We may feel that we have it under control, but not only do we check email more often than we realise, but the interruptions caused are more detrimental than was previously thought. In a study last year, Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email. So people who check their email every five minutes waste 8.5 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before. It had been assumed that email doesn't cause interruptions because the recipient chooses when to check for and respond to email. But Jackson found that people tend to respond to email as it arrives, taking an average of only one minute and 44 seconds to act upon a new email notification; 70% of alerts got a reaction within six seconds. That's faster than letting the phone ring three times. Added to this is the time people spend with their inbox. A July 2006 study by ClearContext, an email management tools vendor, surveyed 250 users and discovered that 56% spent more than two hours a day in their inbox. Most felt they got too much email - by January 2008, 38% of respondents received more than 100 emails a day - and that it stopped them from doing other things. Dr Karen Renaud, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and her colleagues at the University of the West of Scotland discovered that email users fall into three categories: relaxed, driven and stressed. "The relaxed group don't let email exert any pressure on their lives," Renaud says. "They treat it exactly the way that one would treat the mail: 'I'll fetch it, I'll deal with it in my own time, but I'm not going to let it upset me'." The second group felt "driven" to keep on top of email, but also felt that they could cope with it. The third group, however, reacted negatively to the pressure of email. "That causes stress," says Renaud, "and stress causes all sorts of health problems." Renaud's team discovered that while 64% of respondents claimed to check their email once an hour, and 35% said they checked every 15 minutes, they were actually checking it much more frequently - about every five minutes For some people, checking email is no longer a conscious and deliberate act, but a compulsion they are barely aware of. Dr Tom Stafford, a lecturer at the University of Sheffield, England, and co-author of the book Mind Hacks, believes that the same fundamental learning mechanisms that drive gambling addicts are also at work in email users. "Both slot machines and email follow something called a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule'," he says, "which has been established as the way to train in the strongest habits. This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful - an invite out, or maybe some juicy gossip - and I get a reward." This is enough to make it difficult for us to resist checking email, even when we've only just looked.

Słowniczek

as addictive as slot machines - równie uzależniające jak maszyny do gier hazardowych

detrimental - szkodliwy

conscious and deliberate act - świadome i celowe działanie

compulsion they are barely aware of - natręctwo, którego są nieświadomi

mechanisms that drive gambling addicts - mechanizmy, które motywują hazardzistów

train in the strongest habits - utrwalić najsilniejsze przyzwyczajenia