What? No Email?

07/28/2014

The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do, well.
Henry W. Longfellow

Recognizing the disruptive nature of email and instant messaging, Gloria Mark, an expert on focus from the University of California-Irvine decided to find out what would happen if a workplace went cold turkey — no digital messaging — for a whole week. Her experiment, reported in Mother Jones ("Take this Job and Unplug it"; June 2014), resulted in "an enormously calmer, happier group of subjects. Mark put heart rate monitors on the employees while they worked, and discovered that their physical metrics of stress decreased significantly. They also reported feeling less plagued by self-interruptions — that nagging fear of missing out that makes you neurotically check your inbox every few minutes.... When the message flow decreased, so did the hectic multi-tasking efforts. Mark found that workers were flipping between windows on their screens half as often and spent twice as much time focusing on each task."

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