Email stress – who to blame?

[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1561368556385{padding-right: 20px !important;padding-left: 20px !important;background-color: #c7dee8 !important;}”][vc_column][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]Checking emails is a nervous and frustrating tic for many people. While email provides us with a fast and efficient communication tool, receiving too many of them can cause stress. We feel the constant need to check our email even though we do not like email. Like it or not, we still can not live without this tool. Email itself is not the issue, it is our lack of management that is the real problem. So, we need to learn to manage our email in a more efficient way in order to prevent stress and anxiety. The truth is that email works just the way it was originally meant to and actually also better than it used to.

Emails are part of our professional and private life and are here to stay. So how can we make peace with our email inbox? Or better yet, instead of letting email notifications interrupt our work, how can we manage it in an efficient way and make email work in our favor? Fortunately, using the right communication tools can solve this problem. But first let us take a look back at how it all started.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”20920″ img_size=”large”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_column_text]

The problematic use of email

When email first arrived, it was a revolution in business communication. People loved email for what it really was: a communication tool that could make personal and professional life easier by providing people with the opportunity to communicate even though they were not in the same room at the same time. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Today there is something fundamentally wrong with the way people use email. Instead of taking advantage of the efficiency email provides us with and using email for what it is really designed to do, we constantly stop doing our intended work to check our email for no apparent reason. Letting notifications interrupt us over and over again, several times a day, is truly awful. Obviously, this has a direct effect on productivity. As studies by Loughborough University show, once interrupted by an email notification it can take as long as 64 seconds to regain focus and continue working. This means that you are constantly recovering from notifications and almost never completely focused on work. It is the constant need to check email and not being in control that makes people resent their inboxes, develop stress and anxiety towards email management.

It was never Ray Thomlinson’s, the engineer who sent the first email, intention to create a communication tool that would become the root to so much stress, misunderstanding and misuse in the way it is today. But he himself is not overwhelmed by email. He admits that he checks his email pretty often, but only if it is not interrupting something more important. In fact, he can go a whole weekend without checking his email one single time. It is a question of setting the right expectations. If you respond to an email within five minutes of receiving it, people will start expecting that. So, the stress as a result of email use, is not something that was designed as a feature in the email interface. Stress is a human feature created by lack of ability to control a situation.

Take back control

Therefore, the solution to stop constantly checking email and letting notifications interrupt you, is to take control over your email and the way you use it. This can be done with the help of MARK5.

MARK5 has an intelligent automatic filtering system that can sort the inbox into folders which makes it possible for the user to read the important emails first. The user can set up the filtering system exactly as wanted, so it fulfills the demands of the specific user. The system filters out everything unimportant and gives you the opportunity to limit notifications so you get disturbed less and only when absolutely necessary. This feature in MARK5 will limit the overall time you spend on switching back and forth between your email and work. Which gives you the opportunity to focus on work and reduce stress.

Notification hell

Looking forward, if email symbolises one era of “notification hell” today, push notifications are the next era of it as they are designed to interrupt us at the very moment they are received. With the future of push notifications, we might start loving today’s email concept again. Until then, companies must provide their employees with the right communication tools, in order to preserve happy and productive employees. MARK5 is an example of a platform that can contribute to positive email attitude because it allows you to regain control of your email communication by automatic filtering of your email so you do not feel the need to check it all the time.

Related: Five tips to reduce email stress.

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