Share/Save/Bookmark

Dec 26, 2008

Emailaholic or responsibility?

According to Pew Internet Project, 25% of employed email users say they check email "often" even when they have taken a sick day, compared with 17% who say they often check their inboxes before they go to work for the day, and 19% who frequently check their email after leaving work for the day

Fully 22% of employed say that they check their work email accounts “often” during the weekend, compared with just 16% who reported doing this in 2002.

34% employed email users in jobs earning 75,000 USD or more say they check their work email often on the weekends, while just 17% of those earning under 50,000 USD do so.

34% of employed email users say they will at least occasionally check their email on vacations; 11% say they do so often, 14% say they sometimes check in and 9% rarely log in to their email while taking a vacation day.

Dec 19, 2008

50% of corporate employees check their email constantly

Half of work emailers who are currently employed at large corporations check their email constantly, compared with just 32% of those who work for small businesses.

Indeed, there is a considerable amount of overlap in the patterns seen here with wages and job types; as mentioned previously, many of those who earn less than $30,000 work in the service industry, skilled and semi-skilled jobs-professions that are not associated with high levels of internet or email use, according to Pew Internet Project.

Dec 16, 2008

Effects of information overload

A sustained negative neurological effect of information overload has been identified by psychiatrist E.M. Hallowell. He has called this effect Attention Deficit Trait (ADT).

It isn't an illness; it's purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live. When a manager is desperately trying to deal with more input than he possibly can, the brain and body get locked into a reverberating circuit while the brain's frontal lobes lose their sophistication, as if vinegar were added to wine.

The result is black-and-white thinking; perspective and shades of gray disappear. People with Attention Deficit Trait have difficulty staying organised, setting priorities, and managing time, and they feel a constant low level of panic and guilt.

Attention Deficit Trait extends to people working in knowledge environments, which in today is a large portion of the workforce. A Basex survey showed that 28% (2.1 hours) of a knowledge worker’s day is consumed by interruptions. In the United States alone, this translates to 28 billion lost working hours and $588 million in lost profits every year.

Other studies have also shown negative consequences as a result of information overload, such as ignoring anything past the first few options, making mistakes, having difficulty relating the details to the overall issue, wasting time, and needing more time to reach decisions. Read more...

Dec 10, 2008

Employees occasionally check their personal inboxes?

According to Pew Internet Project 54% of employees with personal email accounts say they occasionally check their personal inboxes while at work. Were they completely honest about this issue?...

In the other hand, 39% of all personal emailers say they check their personal accounts at least once a day at work, while 15% report checking in less often than that. Just 7% admit to refreshing their personal inboxes at work constantly, and 4% say they check in several times an hour.

Read more

Dec 4, 2008

The wired world may be changing the way we read

Some scientists think. There are no firm answers yet. But Gary Small, a psychiatrist at UCLA, argues that daily exposure to digital technologies such as the Internet can alter how the brain works.

When the brain spends more time on technology-related tasks and less time exposed to other people, it drifts away from fundamental social skills like reading facial expressions during conversation, Small asserts.

So brain circuits involved in face-to-face contact can become weaker, he suggests. That may lead to social awkwardness, an inability to interpret nonverbal messages, isolation and less interest in traditional classroom learning.

More than 2,000 years ago, Socrates warned about a different information revolution — the rise of the written word, which he considered a more superficial way of learning than the oral tradition. Read more abou it...

Dec 1, 2008

In a depressed economic situation...

Business productivity and saving has become more important. If you are concerned with these issues, E-mail at the workplace is an uselful book for you.

Email overload has become a kind of epidemic in the workplace. In average, employees spend over 40% of their time managing email. Nearly half of that time is lost, it is unproductive. But, there is a lot you can do to improve you email managing skill.

If you want to improve e-mail performance in your workplace, creating more efficient messages and meeting your business communication goals more effectively, this book is for you. Visit www.emailattheworkplace.com. Inside you will find recommendations on how to structure e-mails content, differentiate your subjects better, understand writing communication principles, increase e-mail comprehension and obtain more effective answers.

E-mail at Workplace provides practical guidance for managing writing messages and recipients perception of them, taking into consideration emotional impact that written words have as well as the habits of reading e-mails.

E-mail at the workplace in Amazon.com.