LatchChecking email less often lowers stress
Keeping your inbox open all day feels responsible. You catch things early and nothing piles up. A Canadian experiment found that checking less often made people feel less stressed.
The three-times-a-day experiment
Psychologists Kostadin Kushlev and Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia asked 124 adults to change how they handled email for two weeks. For one week, they checked email only three times a day and turned off email notifications. For the other week, they checked as often as they liked. People reported less daily stress during the week of limited checking (Kushlev and Dunn, 2015).
Checking whenever
Three set times
Nothing else about their jobs changed. The only difference was when they looked at their inbox.
Why constant checking wears you down
Every check is a small interruption you give yourself. Gloria Mark and her colleagues found that when people are interrupted, they often work faster afterward to make up the time, and pay for it with more stress, frustration and effort (Mark, Gudith and Klocke, 2008). The work gets done, but it feels harder.
How to set it up
Pick your times
Three a day is a good start: mid-morning, after lunch and before you finish. If your job needs faster replies, try once an hour on the hour, which is still far less than checking whenever you feel like it.
Turn off email notifications
This was part of the experiment, and it's the change that makes the others stick. If something is truly urgent, people will call.
Tell the people who rely on you
A line in your signature or a quick note to your team ("I check email at 10, 1 and 4") stops anyone wondering why you didn't reply in five minutes.
Apply the same idea to chat and social apps
Slack, WhatsApp and Instagram all reward constant checking. Lock the apps you check compulsively during your work hours and open them at set times. Latch can put them on a weekday schedule so you don't have to decide each morning.
Where Latch fits
Latch is an app blocker that only unlocks when you scan a key you keep somewhere else: an NFC sticker, a printed QR code, or a number of steps. It's free to start, out now on the App Store and Google Play.
Sources
- Kushlev, K. and Dunn, E. W. (2015). Checking email less frequently reduces stress. Computers in Human Behavior 43. ScienceDirect
- Mark, G., Gudith, D. and Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress. Proceedings of CHI 2008. ACM
Photo: public domain (CC0).