3 Recommendations for Dealing with Your Ever-Exhausting Email Inbox


3 Recommendations for Dealing with Your Ever-Exhausting Email Inbox

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Knowledge workers primarily use email to communicate and as their workflow funnel, but those of us in higher education particularly rely on email because our campuses are more complex than most organizations. It’s not like a dean, or a division vice president, can simply replace email with a project management system or a task board that works for their functional area. Eventually, we all need to engage with other people inside and outside of our campus network.

In doing so, we become these human network routers, continually having to confront our email inboxes just to keep up.

It’s exhausting.

But everyone seems to have agreed that email is the easiest way to communicate.

Author Cal Newport questions why knowledge workers continue to subject themselves to the perils of email and the constant context switching to perform mostly administrative tasks. It’s especially harmful for those of us in higher education where sustained attention produces the most value for our institutions and our careers. A Georgetown University associate professor of computer science, Newport wrote an essay two years ago for The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Is Email Making Professors Stupid?” His recent book, “A World Without Email,” expands on his critique of email and how most organizations communicate, and in it he uses many first-person accounts and examples from academe.

Newport isn’t a Luddite who wants to turn back to a time before email — he actually checks multiple email accounts at work (more on that later). Rather, he wants to rid the world of something he identified as the “hyperactive hive mind,” which he defines as “a workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messengers services.” Newport’s term was understandably replaced in the book’s title for an enabler of the hyperactive hive mind and something far more familiar to readers: email.

Since the mid-1990s, email has become ubiquitous in the workplace where now knowledge workers check their inboxes once every six minutes and a third of their working hours are spent in their inboxes. But email is not making our work easier, just as the emergence of personal computers didn’t reduce workload in the late 20th century, and perhaps now with the prevalence of Zoom meetings in the wake of pandemic-induced remote work. The conveniences only escalate demands on specialized professionals to communicate and perform administrative tasks once previously performed by support staff. In the words of technology historian Edward Tenner, email and other technology makes extra work “just easy enough” to do ourselves. Tenner cited studies in his 1996 book, “Why Things Bite Back,” of how little output was realized compared to the proportion of companies’ investments in technology.

Academe is certainly not exempt from the haphazardly constructed workflow enabled by email communication. This workflow can be particularly harmful to professors when it comes to the essential duties of service, such as reviewing applications or sitting on committees, for which there are few controls on how tasks are assigned. “A typical approach to service is to say ‘yes’ to a fire hose of incoming requests,” Newport wrote in his Chronicle article, “until you become so overcommitted that you retreat in desperation to catch up.”

Beyond how service is delegated among faculty within a department, everyone working in higher education experiences either this desperate retreat or a trapping sense of urgency when using email because it’s “just easy enough” in the moment. We conduct unscheduled, asynchronous conversations, which Newport likens to hitting a metaphorical ping-pong ball back and forth with a colleague. Our inboxes curate all our open loops and they become to-do lists populated by others that are prioritized in real time, making tasks seem most important upon their arrival.

So how do we as higher education professionals defeat the hyperactive hive mind? If you’re looking for a simple replacement for email, you won’t find it in Newport’s book, but you will find advice and perspective that will help you restore your exhausted mind, finally put down the ping-pong paddle, and focus on work that matters most.

Even if we can’t change the way our entire university communicates, we can do something to take control of our email-addled minds. Here are three recommendations from Newport’s book inspired by and for higher education professionals:

Simulate Your Own Support Staff
Despite possible long-term benefits, no university is going to hire a one-to-one ratio of professors to administrative assistants or at least add support staff to reduce the cognitive load of workers with specialized roles. Newport suggested that specialists set boundaries on the time that they perform support tasks. For example, only check email between 11 a.m. and noon or only perform tasks such as renewing your parking permit and scheduling meetings between 3-5 p.m.

By pretending to be two different workers — the specialist and the support self — Newport even has two different email addresses: one issued by his university to handle administrative tasks and another that he uses to interact with other professors, students, postdocs he supervises, and research collaborators. Depending on your institution’s post-pandemic remote work policy, you can even have separate environments for these roles, focusing on an intensive project while at home and coming into the office for administrative meetings.

Set Your Office Hours
Newport found inspiration from a common activity in academe in which professors have scheduled office hours to meet with students. All higher education professionals should set office hours, and not just for students.

If someone is stuck, the impulse is to email an expert who will give them the answer to become unstuck. But if they know they are not going to get an immediate answer, they’ll wait until the expert is available via phone call, Zoom, or instant message during the expert’s weekly or daily office hours. It’s a pain in the short term but it results in a more productive operation in the long term because experts won’t be sucked into the hyperactive hive mind and they can maintain sustained concentration on their work. There are circumstances where delays would be costly, so you would need protocols in place such as a phone call but often, when faced with that option, many people who are stuck determine that their request isn’t as urgent as it seems.

Say ‘No’ with a Budget
Higher education professionals often want to be the person who helps others become unstuck in the workplace. A previous HigherEdJobs article about how to say no suggested Newport’s “quota strategy,” where professors determine a fixed amount of time to dedicate to service, but in his book, Newport presents this strategy as a “service budget” and takes it a step further. Professors must have a written agreement of allotted service hours and any requests that exceed their budget must be signed off and approved by the dean or department chair. Overload is common, Newport wrote, “because its magnitude is hidden” and “it’s easy to push just one more thing onto someone else’s plate.” He added, “When (managers are) facing stark numbers, it becomes difficult to justify overload.”

In Conclusion
Newport’s world without email might seem idealistic, and his book explains that it will take organizational resistance to the hyperactive hive mind. But individuals can make a difference, and not through quick fixes such as writing better subject lines. There is a world, even in a post-pandemic world, where we as higher education professionals can be exposed to ideas and people while still saving us from ourselves and our inboxes. “If this exposure is delivered through unsolicited email messages,” Newport said, “you can accidentally drown trying to keep up.”



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