Tag Archives: email

Working Toward Simplification, Starting With Notifications

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Let me tell you a tale of woe.

One day, I left both of my cell phones (one for work, one personal) at home. FOR AN ENTIRE DAY.

It was terrible fine. Truly, what I thought was going to make my life harder ended up making my work day way more efficient. However, I didn’t realize how much more efficient it had been until the next day, when I had my phones next to me all day.

Ding, buzz, alert! Ding, buzz, alert! Ding, buzz, alert!

On and on and on, my phones vibrated or buzzed or alerted me to some breaking email or news or social media update. None of it important, nothing that required taking my attention from my task and getting me off track every five minutes. No wonder some days I feel like I’m spinning in a hamster wheel! And most of the time I don’t even swipe my phone open to further investigate or read those emails. But that simple act of breaking my attention span is enough to derail me.

Coincidentally, I’ve been reading a book about living a simplified life (think decluttering everything from your home to your obligations and putting the emphasis on the real necessities in life to capture more joy). And the night after my epiphany about my phones being a huge distraction, lo and behold, there was a chapter about digital distractions and some tips on how to handle it all.

Step one was turn off the notifications.

Turn off notifications? Can I live like that? A life without knowing when I received an email or someone liked my Facebook post? (Also, why have I never thought of that before?)

I turned off all the notifications on my phone (with the exception of text messages and phone calls – I have two kiddos in different schools, so I’m not going to take the chance of missing important school notifications.) But otherwise, I haven’t heard a ding or a buzz or a beep all morning and it has been glorious.

Another tip is one that takes a bit more work: decluttering your email. Maybe you have the same issue – do you get near daily emails about products or services you use? Yep, me too. It can be tedious to go through and unsubscribe to each email, but there are some ways around that. Unroll.me, for example, allows you to see all of your email subscriptions and easily unsubscribe.

Whether or not you recognize how much of a distraction our devices can cause, I hope this helps you take a pause and think about how your life is ruled by that tiny computer in your pocket or next to you on your desk. While I’m not suggesting leaving your phones at home all day, you might try a digital detox and see what you discover about it in your own life. (And if you do, let me know in the comments so I can try it too!)

 

Cheers to the Network Security Administrators

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Here’s a little tip – don’t check your work email on your mobile phone while riding in an airport shuttle on the way back to your car from vacation.

Don’t quickly open any emails saying you had a recent sign-in attempt and need to remedy your information.

Don’t click the link! DON’T do it.

I did it.

Yep, it was me. The person who studied and learned about fraud, email phishing, social engineering (and a lot of other terrifying cybersecurity issues) for a 1,200-plus word story for BizVoice® magazine last year. The person who has warned everyone about these issues since learning all those terrifying things. The one who pays close attention when data breaches are discussed in the media.

It was me. I did it. Ugh.

Thankfully, I realized what I’d done nearly immediately. I clicked on the link, but I didn’t enter any information and I quickly alerted our network guardian angel administrator, Jeff. Then I panicked all the way home from my relaxing vacation.

But Jeff let me know he was keeping an eye on it, and that I hadn’t broken everything (I was sure I had). Such a relief I have rarely felt in my adult life.

After a self-admonishing mea culpa when I returned to the office, I was again put at ease upon being reminded that this happens more regularly than I realized and that it’s a very easy thing to fall for.

That is NOT an excuse for complacency, of course. Think before you click! Make sure you know your company’s security protocols, think critically about the email address the email is coming from (does your security administrator typically handle anything related to Microsoft? Then Microsoft is probably not emailing you directly!). Just pay attention.

I was reminded firsthand that our information technology and network security administrators are on the front lines of keeping our dumb mistakes at bay.

Thank goodness for that.

If you’ve got a great networking security team supporting your workplace, thank them when you get the chance. You probably don’t always know or understand what they do, but when things get dicey, you’ll really appreciate their expertise.

(If you don’t have a network security team, you’re risking a lot. Check out that BizVoice story I mentioned above for more about the pitfalls of not being covered by good security measures.)

Email Flood Keeps Pouring It On

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I’ve tried, unsuccessfully for the most part, to reduce the stranglehold of email on my business life. I’ve followed some of the guidelines — only check at certain times of the day, create folders for next steps, etc. — but that doesn’t seem to stop the unending flow.

A recent New York Times technology column noted that a research firm study calculated that people send 182 billion emails each day around the world. The annual total: More than 67 trillion messages. (In 2012, the numbers were 144 billion a day and 52 trillion total). Active email accounts increased from 3.3 billion to 3.9 billion, with 6% growth expected in each of the next four years.

Here are a few other observations in the Times column:

“It’s behavioral economics 101,” said Clive Thompson, author of a new book, “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better” and an occasional contributor to The New York Times Magazine. “You make it easy for people to do something, they will do more of it.”

Studies have shown that all this email leads to an unproductive and anxiety-ridden workplace, said Gloria Mark, an informatics professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has been studying the effects of email in the workplace since 2004. Ms. Mark’s research has found that people who stopped using email at work felt less stress and were more focused and productive.

Mr. Thompson said that in the workplace, email had become a major barrier of efficiency. “People feel the need to include 10 other people on an email just to let them know they are being productive at work,” he said. “But as a result, it ends up making those other 10 people unproductive because they have to manage that email.”

Branko Cerny, founder of SquareOne, which bills itself as a stress-free email client, said that technology could help solve the problems of email on the receiving end, which SquareOne does by presorting and flagging important messages, but that only human awareness could stop senders from inundating us.

In the past, with physical letters, people put thought into what they were going to write before they sent it, Mr. Cerny said. With digital, it’s send first, think later.

The author closes with the following: “For those who can’t seem to handle the onslaught of email, there is always the extreme option. When messages pile up, select all, hit delete and declare email bankruptcy (his lead shared that was his strategy in going from 46,315 unread emails in his inbox on Dec. 31, 2013 to none on his first day back to work in the new year).”

“Reply All” Madness! (At Least the Student Sent a Tasteful Message)

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It’s Replyallcalypse 2012. Hide the women and children! There are no rules now!

Actually, a student accidentally hit "reply all" and sent a message to each of his fellow New York University students… not really that big of a deal, but a good thing to keep in mind when communicating in this medium. NYU Local reports:

39,979 students received a message from the Bursar’s Office. All 39,979 were on NYU’s “src-contacts” mailing list.

39,979 students were about to meet Max Wiseltier.

“I was trying to forward the message to my mom, to get her input on the paperless tax forms,” Max Wiseltier, sophomore, explained later, “but all of NYU was cc’ed accidentally.”

When Max went to forward the innocuously titled “Opting Out of the Paper Version of Your 1098T” to his mother, he had no idea that he was one fatal “reply all” away from NYU fame.

His accidental email and hasty apology triggered a rare, University-wide revelation: We simultaneously realized that any message, complaint, whim, link, video, or GIF could be sent to nearly 40,000 people in an instant.

We had been given a great and terrible power. For a moment we contemplated responsibility, then gleefully tossed it aside in favor of posting pictures of cats. The ensuing hours were referred to as “The Reply-Allpocalypse,” “The Day NYU Broke,” and “Will Everyone Please Just Shut Up.”

But how could this happen? Are we allowed to blame Max Wiseltier for all this? In brief: “poorly constructed listserves”; “no”.

NYU Local’s tech editor, Ben Zweig, explains: “NYU uses something called E-Mail Direct for most mass emails. That system is meant for one-way emailing.” E-Mail Direct does not allow for reply-alls, therefore you cannot respond to most mass emails. Several NYU departments still rely on the older, discussion-based ListManager program, however. ListManager also sends mass emails, but allows discussions (in the form of reply-alls), unless the settings are adjusted, disabling group discussions and only permitting emails from admins.”

“I Need My Tweets, Man!”

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It appears Tweeting or checking emails may actually be more addictive than cigarettes or alcohol. The Guardian has the latest reason the human race is destined for some awful fate.

Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires.

They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings or cravings to use social and other media.

A team headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University’s Booth Business School say their experiment, using BlackBerrys, to gauge the willpower of 205 people aged between 18 and 85 in and around the German city of Würtzburg is the first to monitor such responses "in the wild" outside a laboratory.

The results will soon be published in the journal Psychological Science.

The participants were signalled seven times a day over 14 hours for seven consecutive days so they could message back whether they were experiencing a desire at that moment or had experienced one within the last 30 minutes, what type it was, the strength (up to irresistible), whether it conflicted with other desires and whether they resisted or went along with it. There were 10,558 responses and 7,827 "desire episodes" reported.

"Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success," said Hofmann. Sleep and leisure were the most problematic desires, suggesting "pervasive tension between natural inclinations to rest and relax and the multitude of work and other obligations".

The researchers found that as the day wore on, willpower became lower. Their paper says highest "self-control failure rates" were recorded with media. "Resisting the desire to work was likewise prone to fail. In contrast, people were relatively successful at resisting sports inclinations, sexual urges, and spending impulses, which seems surprising given the salience in modern culture of disastrous failures to control sexual impulses and urges to spend money."

Study: Social Media Gaining on Email in Popularity with Small Businesses

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I’ll be honest; I found this rather surprising. eMarketer reports:

Social media has quickly moved up the ranks of top marketing tactics among small and medium-sized business (SMBs). April 2011 research from Pitney Bowes indicates that by some measures of desirability, it’s in close competition with email.

When asked why they used several marketing tactics, US SMBs were most likely to say they chose social media marketing for its cost-effectiveness (54%) and ease of use (53%).

Respondents were still more likely to rate email as cost-effective and easy to use, but the older online marketing channel was ahead by less than 10 percentage points. No format besides social media approached it in these dimensions.

SMBs also tended to feel nearly as comfortable and knowledgeable with social media as they did with email, ahead of other channels.

Social media fell behind two other marketing tactics—direct mail and advertising—in “proven effectiveness,” however.

Still, its value for money spent has helped social media adoption rise quickly among small businesses. Pitney Bowes found that social media was used more frequently than direct mail, though still behind email and advertising overall. And it was the marketing tactic most likely to have been adopted in the past year, with 20% of respondents having taken it up in that time.

Email marketing software firm Constant Contact also found in April 2011 that usage of social media marketing was more popular among small businesses than direct mail, and behind only email marketing, a company website and print advertising. Four out of five respondents to that survey said they had increased their use of social media marketing in the past year.

Within the social realm, respondents were most likely to use Facebook, and rated it most effective of any venue.

Did Idaho Rep. Cross Line with Teacher Email?

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Politics and policy came together inappropriately when an Idaho legislator tried to recruit teachers and students to fight proposed education reforms. The line appears to be clear between encouraging government class discussions and actively seeking referendum opponents. The Idaho Statesman reports:

House Minority Leader John Rusche told Rep. Sue Chew on Monday that an email sent from her legislative account to nearly 800 addressees was inappropriate.

The May 12 email suggested high school government classes focus on referendums seeking to overturn three education reform laws authored by GOP Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna.

“Allowing students to register to vote and keeping them informed of upcoming events, such as the referendum, is a way for the teachers to instill the rhetoric from class within their students’ lives,” said the email.

Under the subject line, “Next steps?” the email went to many teachers, mostly to private email accounts, but about 30 went to school accounts.

“It’s inappropriate to talk about encouraging activity in the classroom around a specific position on the referendum,” said Rusche, of Lewiston. “I thought this was over the line and deserved to be corrected. She acknowledged that and said it wouldn’t happen again.”

The day after Chew’s email — but before he knew of it — Luna emailed a warning to school trustees and administrators that educators who engaged in political activity at school were subject to firing for violating their ethics code.

Luna received a copy of Chew’s email four days after his warning memo from Star City Councilman Gary Smith, a recipient. Wrote Smith: “I don’t want my taxes being used for political campaigns, especially when they are using their office and their position to influence our kids.”

Chew said she erred. “We’ll do things better next time,” she said, adding that her aim was to keep young people politically active after a heated debate.

Drowning in Communication

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Ever wonder how many e-mails were sent in 2010? No? Well I’m glad your mind is occupied with more useful information. But you still might like to see these numbers from Royal Pingdom:

        Email

  • 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
  • 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
  • 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
  • 480 million – New email users since the year before.
  • 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
  • 262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
  • 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
  • 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.

       Social Media

  • 152 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
  • 25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010
  • 100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010
  • 175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010
  • 7.7 million – People following @ladygaga (Lady Gaga, Twitter’s most followed user).
  • 600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010.
  • 250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010.
  • 30 billion – Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month.
  • 70% – Share of Facebook’s user base located outside the United States.
  • 20 million – The number of Facebook apps installed each day.

State Legislators Cope with Email Volume; Texas Congressman Stays in Touch Using Twitter

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The Thicket blog recently took a look at how state legislators are dealing with email volume. The writer explains some of the responses were encouraging, while some likely won’t be received too well by constituents.

Some of the legislators who have their own staff had maladroit messages like, "I won’t be able to respond to your message myself, but one of my staff will get back to you" or, perhaps worse, the automated message came from a staff person, not the legislator, in the first place.  Staff may in fact be the ones who respond, but there are more graceful ways to explain this to constituents.  Announcing in advance that staff will respond seems gratuitous at best and patronizing at worst.

While some have been negotiating the world of email, folks like Congressman John Culberson of Texas have been pioneering constituent relations by using Twitter — the latest and greatest way to communicate using "micro-blogging." Check out Culberson’s Twitter feed here.