Ste are enveloped in a culture of urgencies that have nothing urgent about them. Symptomatic of the times is the relationship with the e-mail box, an indicator of how much we are infected by the “fever of productive growth”, to quote Italo Calvino. Many of us compulsively monitor emails even in the evening, even on the weekendready to give up family, friends, reading, entertainment to respond at any time, without realizing how stressful it is to never completely disconnect from work.
Social psychologists Laura Giurgeof the London Business School, e Vanessa Bohnsof Cornell University, they proved by a series of eight experiments that we developed a specific mental distortiona bias as they say in scientific language, an error of assessment that leads us to believe that a quick reply to professional communications is indispensable.
Thinking about it, what is in the e-mail box is usually not indifferent. Instead, prisoners of the idea of always having to appear reliable, performing, productiveyou end up at the mercy of other people’s agendas.
The trap of smart working
The phenomenon has grown with smart working, in which the barriers between office and private life have often given way: afternoons are boundless in the evenings, weekdays in the weekends. Paradoxically, the less we are tied to physical spaces, the more there is the risk, with the amplified use of digital tools, of not finding temporal corners exempt from commitments. Those who are dedicating themselves to a task may not think that the people they write an email to are on vacation but connected thanks to their smartphone.
The ability to connect anywhere has blurred the boundaries between work time and private life.
Senders underestimate how invested recipients can feel about the need to follow up on the notification promptly and how exhausting this can be in the long run. Remote working has revolutionized companies, which however have not simultaneously equipped themselves with a suitable grammar, with codes suitable for the different way of working.
Anxiety to respond immediately
A request from the boss that appears on the computer can be interpreted by an employee as an order to be carried out in the shortest possible time. “When you are in a position of power, your whisper sounds like a scream,” warns Bohns in his essay You have more influence than you think (published by the New York publishing house WW Norton & Company), in which he explains how the lack of awareness of the effect of our actions on others can lead a leader to abuse his position even unintentionally.
Half of employees even respond within an hour to emails from colleagues and superiors: so it results from the data of two million users, analyzed over the course of several months by the engineering school of the University of Southern California. Studies have found that recipients who believe they should check their inbox after office hours tended to be more anxious. However, the perceived pressure became less when senders wrote a simple sentence like: “It’s not urgent.”
Some have the mental strength to resist, by silencing notifications and giving himself limited hours to check his mail, when on vacation, just a couple of times a day. But not everyone does it. For this reason, it should be the recipients who change the sending styles.
Anti-stress etiquette
An IT etiquette is spreading in the Anglo-Saxon world. By now, in the communications of many academics it is easy to read a standard sentence similar to this at the bottom: «You may receive emails from me outside normal working hours, the result of my personal balance between private and professional life. I would never expect you to reply when you are not working.’ It is a formula to be copied and made your own.
One of the positives of the Covid era is that people have become more thoughtful about communicating digital boundaries and more understanding about accepting them. After all, in many cases the sender doesn’t even want a quick response, while the receiver cares about the needs of others. There are ways in mailboxes to label a message as “high priority” and it would be okay to flag those that are low priority as well.
Put another way, when an executive sends an email on a Friday night they should make the implicit expectations explicitadding a line to clarify that it doesn’t expect a weekend hit.
Digital rudeness
Emails should be traced back to their asynchronous roots, suggest researchers Giurge and Bohns. They are a valuable tool precisely because they do not require dialogue to take place simultaneously. It would be an advantage to go back to considering electronic exchanges more similar to paper mail than to mobile phone text messages, which is often followed by prompt confirmation, even if it’s just a thumbs-up reaction. Not emails: we open them when we can.
This mode obviously only works if there is civilization in the office. It doesn’t work if the executives expect their staff to snap to attention at the slightest request, on pain of losing esteem and trust. Recognize digital rudeness for words in all capital letters, for exclamation points to underline the tone of command, for hasty sentences.
The problem goes far beyond email, that’s for sure. And even more so free time should be protected from intrusions.
Curb the overload of messages
In general, notifications destroy attention span. Interrupting an activity to check email derails our train of thought and zeroes concentration. We all drown in messages. One step to save ourselves is to stop confusing promptness with courtesy.
For most of human history, demonstrating care has meant attending to the needs of a small group of family, friends, neighbors. Now there is no limit to requesting people who can break into your mailbox and smartphone messages. If we want to curb the virtual overload we must at least redefine the concept of responsiveness. Let’s take our time and answer when we can, starting with a very kind «thanks for your patience».
Eliana Liotta (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
Eliana Liotta is a journalist, writer and science popularizer. On iodonna.it and on the main platforms (Spreaker, Spotify, Apple Podcast and Google Podcast) you can find her podcast series The good that I want.
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The review is by Anna Ogliari, director of the school of specialization in clinical psychology at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University.
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