The dark side of email
...and other time stealers

Too much to do, too little time!

Our Working Parents & Carers Flexible Working Survey told us that among things we grapple with are sheer volume of work and the challenges involved in blurring boundaries between work and life

These issues are not limited to parents and carers of course, or even to flexible workers but often their situation means that work overload and time pressures have more impact than on those that are able or willing to extend working hours accordingly.

A near universal lament was the simple lack of time.

It wasn't meant to be like this

In the 1950s, Churchill predicted an age of leisure enabled by technological advances that would give the worker a "four day week and then three days fun".

So where did it all go wrong?

Ian Price, author of The Activity Illusion, suggests it is often less about time than we might think. We may be frantically busy both at work and outside but how often do we question how effective we are being?

Squandering 'effective' time on email

The technology of the twenty-first century office - a key enabler of flexible working - also has a dark side. Email in particular is a critical tool and, when compared to previous means of written communication such as the typed "memo", liberating.

However, its use has penetrated working life to an extent that we can sometimes be forgiven for thinking that we come to work just to do our email. Research by the University of Toronto in 2004 suggests that when you work out how much of a typical company's payroll is spent on workers processing unproductive work email - not spam or personal mail, simply work email that does not contribute to the worker's objectives - the average is twelve percent. So a large chunk of our precious time is being squandered just on the way we use email.

Responding to each beep

Added to this is the impact of interruptions and distractions driven by our tendency to respond to each beep or appearance of an envelope icon on our laptop by stopping what we are doing and reading the new message. We believe we are being diligent by "multi-tasking" but again, research shows that when we do this, we take longer to get through our work and make twice as many mistakes than if we were to do one thing at a time.

Central to a flexible worker's toolkit, but...

There are added issues of course with BlackBerry and other devices that flash at us as new messages arrive. Of course these tools are central to the flexible worker's toolkit but, poorly used, they can be a source of distraction that means our non-work activities and responsibilities are never quite free of the burdens of work.

As well as the impact on those around us (the Wall Street Journal coined the chilling expression "BlackBerry Orphans"), neurologists are increasingly concerned about the impact on our mental performance of the modern way of working.

The way we work

So this may be less about time and more about the way we work. Price asserts that huge benefits can be gleaned from a small number of changes in the way we use communications technology, with email being an easy win.

My Family Care is delighted to have Ian Price as part of the team of subject matter experts leading our 60minute Seminars. Ian's seminar topics cover managing email and making the best use of meetings.

Seminar topics Ian Price may deliver for My Family Care:

The activity illusion - how to manage your email

Parents and carers are particularly prone to the way in which email penetrates all aspects of our lives with a growing trend towards 24/7 responsiveness. Has a powerful tool for flexible working become a source of inefficiency or worse, an addictive technology that takes over? This session provides practical tips for getting email back where it belongs – a tool in the flexible worker's toolkit.

Managing Meetings - Conquer your workplace Dementors!

For flexible workers, scarce face-to-face time and energy soaked up in meetings that overrun or are unproductive can have a disastrous knock-on impact. How often do we challenge the way a meeting is run or plan our own meetings to get the best out of them? This session looks at how to optimise the effectiveness of our meetings.

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