Addicted to Email? Dr Tom has the cure
Tom Stafford, author of Mind Hacks: Tips and Tools for Using your Brain and psychologist, thinks that he might be addicted to email.
He tells a disturbing story (extra disturbing because I see myself in it):
I must hit the ‘get mail’ button at least a hundred times a day. Sometimes, if I don’t have any new mail, I hit it again immediately, just to check. I interrupt my work to check my mail even when I know that I’m not going to find anything interesting and that I should just concentrate on what I am supposed to be doing. When I come back to my office it’s the first thing I do. If I’m prevented from checking my mail for more than a few hours I get a little jumpy and remain that way until I have.
He thinks that the answer is to be found in “operant conditioning”, one of the cardinal principles of behaviourist psychology:
This means the mechanisms by which behaviour is shaped by its consequences; how what we do depends on the rewards and punishments of what we did last time. This topic is the heart of behaviourism, that school of thought which dominated psychology for most of the last century.
One solution is to break the connection between action and reward. Like Glen Stansberry and Merlin Mann 
he recommends reducing the frequency of mail checks. Hard-core fans of the cold turkey school will check mail only twice a day. I would rather cut my heart out with a teaspoon, but it might work for you. Or close Mail.app altogether for six or eight hours. Urrggh.
Other possibilities, he suggests, are weakening the stimulus-action association (hide the Check Mail button), shifting the cost-benefit ratio (electric shocks administered by a mail check?) and rewarding alternative behaviour.
Whatever you might think about Behaviourism, it’s interesting reading, as is the link he provides to an article published eighteen months ago in the New York Times on designing computer interfaces that aid rather than diminish attention.
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Tags: addiction, behaviourism, email, Internet, mail checks, Productivity
September 28th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
Have these people not heard of automatic mail-checking? I’d think that if there’s no explicit action involved, there would be no conditioning. I know there’s new mail when the “new mail” sound plays and a badge appears on the Mail icon; the only time I hit “check mail” myself is when I’m troubleshooting connection issues.
September 29th, 2006 at 4:20 am
Here’s a thought… create a hack that intercepts the ‘check email’ button… it will let you click it, and you’ll be fooled into seeing the activity window or progress bars indicate something is happening, but it won’t actually check unless xx amount of minutes/hours have passed – and it increments the time the *more* you press the button. Since the button therefore is less and less ‘rewarding’, you slowly condition yourself to not press it as much. :)
September 29th, 2006 at 5:20 am
Even though my mail is set to check once every 10 minutes, I do find myself hitting “check mail” when I’m procrastinating. The habit is hard to break (I agree with the operant conditioning argument!).
What has helped me is to kill the “new mail” noise (actually, I did that a long time ago) and to routinely hide the mail window. Out of sight, out of mind.
Margaret
September 29th, 2006 at 6:24 am
Don’t worry about being addicted Tim. It’s not like you created a website devoted to email. ;)
September 30th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
I start up Mail every few days, when I remember. My mobile phone is switched off. Life is better that way!
September 30th, 2006 at 7:30 pm
Ahhh, how I envy you!
October 1st, 2006 at 3:20 pm
My life is much better since I got a Blackberry. Now I don’t have to rush back from lunch to check my email; I can enjoy a leisurely lunch with friends. I can now sleep in on the weekends because I can check my email from bed without disturbing my partner by switching on the MacBook Pro that I keep under my bed, and if I duck out for a toilet break at work, I can read my email while at the urinal.
I think perhaps Tom Stafford should get a Blackberry too, which would release him from the vice of always clicking the send-and-receive button on his mail client.
October 9th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
He’s right–intermittent reward (not being certain when you’re going to get the reward of new email–the first button push, the fifth, the ninth) is the most powerful tool of operant conditioning,
(Sorry, my psyche and counseling degrees are showing again. :D )
October 20th, 2006 at 3:18 am
Has anyone created the hack that Miguel suggests? I could really use it right about now!