Key takeaways
- An interruption costs about 23 minutes of refocus; an open inbox produces dozens a day.
- Limiting checks to three a day lowered stress in a randomised trial with no loss of output.
- Batching only holds if each batch is small; do the drafting and chasing before the check.
The tab is always there. Every new message is a small decision: read it now, or not. The research on interruption says those small decisions are not small at all.
Twenty-three minutes
Gloria Mark's field studies at UC Irvine followed knowledge workers through their days and found that after an interruption it took, on average, about 23 minutes to return to the original task at the same level of focus. People compensated by working faster, which raised stress and error rates. An inbox that pings is a device for producing that interruption dozens of times a day.
Three times a day
The experimental evidence is cleaner than the field evidence. Kushlev and Dunn's crossover trial had 124 adults limit checking to three times a day for one week and check freely the other. Daily stress was significantly lower in the limited week, with no measurable loss in getting things done. The participants found it hard to resist checking, and resisting is what produced the benefit.
What batching needs to work
Batching fails when the batch is too big to finish. If three checks a day mean three sessions of forty unread threads, each needing a reply written from scratch, the sessions overrun and the discipline breaks by Wednesday. Batching works when each session is mostly reading and deciding, because the drafting and the chasing have been done before you opened the tab.
Making each batch small
That is the job PeakLook does between your sessions: scan the Focused inbox, skip the newsletters, draft a reply for every thread that needs one, and run the follow-ups that are due. When you open the inbox, the drafts are waiting and the chasing has happened. The batch shrinks to the decisions, and three times a day becomes enough.
PeakLook is built for this
Mail that gets answered. Follow-ups that never die. Coming soon, free during the beta.
Questions
What about urgent email?
Does turning off notifications help?
Will people notice I reply in batches?
Sources
- Mark G., Gudith D., Klocke U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress. CHI. https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/chi08-mark.pdf
- Kushlev K., Dunn E.W. (2015). Checking email less frequently reduces stress. Comput Human Behav. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563214005810