Many people talk to me about the stress that email causes them. Often we think about email stress as caused by sheer quantity: many professionals receive 50–200 emails a day which can easily pile up and cause stress if they’re not efficiently handled.
But email itself is not the problem. Email is just the communication tool we happen to currently use.
A powerful way to remind yourself of the deeper purpose behind your communications is to stop using email as a verb, when you’re writing something down on your task list, conversing with colleagues, or talking to yourself in your head about your upcoming actions.
Writing “Email Susan” on your task list is vague – it may be clear to you at the moment, but three hours or three days later, your brain will have to work a bit to remember what you needed to contact Susan about, and with what intention. Even writing “Email Susan about the evaluation committee” doesn’t adequately distinguish what kind of communication you need to create. Using more specific verbs clarifies your needed actions on your task list and in your mind.
For instance, try using some of these verbs instead:
respond, explain, reassure, clarify, advise
ask, inquire, explore, research, wonder
claim, argue, suggest, offer, share
connect, soothe, answer, amuse, deflect
read, learn, note, record, survey
Thinking to yourself “this morning I’m going to respond to students and then ask my collaborator about draft two of our article” distinguishes the kinds of connections you will be forming as well as the kinds of people you will be communicating with. More specific verbs let you tap into the deeper reasons for your use of email (to be a responsive teacher, or a helpful collaborator).
Surveying your inbox first before you start responding allows you to group similar communicative actions or intentions together, which also reduces the cognitive dissonance that can occur if you only process email in the order in which it appears in your inbox. Switching from explaining to asking to explaining again can be more tiring for many people than if you do similar actions together. Grouping can also lead to greater efficiency because you can see larger patterns. For example, responding to all the student emails in a batch can help you see if there are similar questions arising about an assignment that you might want to address with the whole class.
All emails are not the same, whether to read or to write. Simply changing the language you use to think about email can greatly reduce email stress by clarifying your actions and your intended roles.
[Creative Commons licensed image from Flickr user Luca Conti]
How does thinking about email in a different way change things for you? Let us know in the comments!
