The Science of Success: In this new series, we’ll scan the latest scientific, academic, and professional literature, looking at everything from psychology to physics to bring you new insights on how to be more successful.
We’ve never met, but I’m willing to bet that if I took a peek at your email account right now, I’ll discover absolute chaos. More likely, you’ve a few hundred emails cluttering your inbox, with at least a few dozen of them unread. This doesn’t mean you’re an email slob; it means you’re a normal American.
According to the global research company the Radicati Group, the average number of business-related emails each of us sends and receives every day is on a constant rise, from 121 each day last year to at least 140 per day by 2018, a 16 percent growth.
If you consider the fact that the average American workday, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is 8.7 hours, this means each one of us currently sends or receives about 14 emails per work hour, a tremendous distraction from our actual work that is only expected to grow. And that’s before we’ve factored in the time we all spend browsing non-work-related sites—from reading the news to looking up exes on Facebook—activities which, according to some recent estimates, take up considerable chunks of our time. Look at these numbers, and you may wonder how it is that any work gets done at all.
But you’d be wrong: according to a new book called Work Smarter with Social Media, by online engagement expert Alexandra Samuel, all this digital overload may actually be working in your favor.
“Digital overload,” Samuel writes, “helps us sharpen our focus, by challenging us to make constant, systematic choices about where we’ll invest our time and attention. This helps us develop habits that make it easier to manage all the distractions and requests that can blow us off course—not just the digital ones.”
Drawing on the work of Daniel Goleman, the renowned psychologist who coined the term “Emotional Intelligence,” Samuel argues that to be effective at our jobs, we need to learn how to focus, and to learn how to focus, we must learn how to prioritize between various competing options.
“To make these decisions efficiently,” she continues, “we need to develop broad heuristics—guidelines that help us consistently (and over time, instinctively) determine what information will get our attention and what won’t, in alignment with established personal, professional, and organizational goals.”
Digital overload, then, only helps us sharpen our inner algorithm. Because we know each morning that we’re about to sit down at our desks and face an onslaught of information vying for our attention, we develop a dynamic decision tree in our heads: do we answer yesterday’s unopened email before reading The New York Times? Do we finish that proposal, or browse for new contacts on LinkedIn? These, Samuel says, aren’t distractions; they’re opportunities to get very clear about what our goals actually are, as well as acquire new digital skills allowing us better command of everything from our inbox to our calendars.
So take another look at those piled-up emails, and rest easy: they’re nothing more than training tools. Master them, and you’ve mastered time itself.