Maybe Don’t Send That Email

by Dan Krutka

Years ago my older, and obviously wiser, department chair caught me off guard with a complaint directed at me, “I don’t like when you send me emails on the weekend.” I remember my initial reaction was to brand her a Luddite (which I mistakenly thought was a negative label at the time) and I thought, “Why don’t you just not check emails on the weekend?” Yet, I respected her and the way she expressed her concern unsettled me. This wasn’t a casual comment. I can still remember how she made a sweeping gesture with her hands as she pulled the words from a place of deep concern. She really did NOT. WANT. THOSE. EMAILS.

The Email Invasion

Electronic mail began to be used widely in the 1980s and 1990s. Email was developed with the intended purpose of sending asynchronous messages in large organizations. I remember the rise of the internet during my childhood, but it was well established once I began college and chose the email dank@ou.edu. Even though email is a substantial component of labor in higher education, I can never remember anyone trying to set guidelines, policies, or even open discussions about its role in our work (aside from my former chair’s aforementioned comment). 

My department chair grew up without email and likely experienced academia without it. Our fifth critical question about technology is helpful here: Why is it difficult to imagine a world without email? For many of us, a job without email may seem impossible, but there’s a long history of universities and schools without email. How did they accomplish their work? Are we sure email improved our work, relationships, and lives? 

Over the last 15 years, widespread internet access and smartphone adoption has resulted in a digital intensification of labor because workers can exchange emails anywhere, anytime. As a faculty member, I have long felt the anxiety and stress from the constant pull of email on my attention. I frequently swipe down on my smartphone screen to see what work the email slot machine will assign me. The randomness of an inbox for general, and thus a wide array of purposes, distracts me with shallow tasks while I put off the ones that give my professional life meaning.

My most important labor requires long spans of time and focused attention for the creative work of planning lessons and courses, reading articles and books, developing research plans, rethinking programs, and more. In fact, much knowledge work requires time to figure out—intentionally and serendipitously—what work to pursue. However, it can be difficult to protect these long-spans of time with emails calling my attention to digitally sign forms or direct the sender to the correct person in another department. Knowledge workers can spend hours of their workday exchanging emails with significant time required to refocus attention back to the task that the email interrupted (Newport, 2021).

Email also has shortcomings as a communication medium. People who are stressed can compose poorly written messages as they try to hurry through their inbox. It’s easy to misinterpret emails without the tone or cues the sender often imagines in their heads as they compose their message (see Key & Peele’s NSFW “Text Message Confusion” skit). Workers are often prone to “negative intensification bias” where they “read into messages negativity the sender didn’t intend, or they exaggerate even a hint of negativity” (Sillars & Zorn, 2021; Zorn, 2021, n.p.). If we have a poor relationship with someone or are just frustrated in the moment, we can easily read their emails through that lens.

Telling people not to check emails is not a solution if the emails keep coming. Studies suggest that humans' evolutionary instincts to respond to others combined with constant inbox access means that even the unconscious prospect of emails can increase stress and anxiety (Newport, 2016). Just the knowledge that I sent, or could send, weekend emails likely induced anxiety in my department chair because her instinct to respond to me doesn’t disappear just because she tells herself she is not working on the weekend. I know because I received several emails this weekend (while I was writing this blog post) requesting I solve a problem. While I am not going to reply over the weekend, my conscious and unconscious mind can not quit thinking about how I will respond.

In succumbing to our need to respond to emails, we create more emails, which require more labor. In general, emails create more of the work we don’t want. The only thing that will lower anxiety for many people is knowing—consciously and unconsciously—that less (or no) emails are coming and no one expects an immediate response. We need to restructure our norms around email so we all feel comfortable setting limits (or “guardrails,” Warzel & Peterson, 2021) in our lives.

Email Literature

I am writing this blog post now because I recently became department chair (see a live reenactment of the event) and one of my first priorities has been to rethink the workflows in our department so faculty, staff, and students have choices about their relationship to email and other labor technologies. Over this last month, I have listened to the books of Georgetown University computer science professor Cal Newport: A World Without Email (2021); Deep Work (2016); and Digital Minimalism (2019). Newport’s work is largely centered on helping knowledge workers rethink their relationship and choices with work technology. Newport contends that digital technologies have left many professionals bound to shallow tasks that prevent them from dedicating their efforts to deep, focused work in their areas of expertise. Answering emails can be easier than planning out how to do our most important work. Just as social media provides many of us too easy an escape from boredom or solitude, email provides easy escape from answering the question, what work should I do right now? 

Newport argues that we can improve our workflows by identifying the work that is most valuable and then work backward to figure out which technologies, used in which ways, best supports completing it. As a side note, his books are written for white-collar workers with the privilege to make decisions about their work lives, and I don’t particularly like how Newport sometimes frames success through individualistic, competitive, and capitalist lenses. However, I do believe many of the ideas can be translated to relational, cooperative, and communal efforts.

Reading these books has allowed me to pick back up a line of inquiry I started years ago when I read University of Washington Information School professor David Levy’s book Mindful Tech (find his book and more in my podcast shownotes). Like Newport, Levy argues for a more focused approach to work, but he is inspired by mindfulness practices. Years after reading the book, I still remember reading Levy’s caution that people tend to hunch over and barely breathe when responding to emails. I immediately recognized that’s how I answered emails. He then argued that if we are to answer emails, we can even find a sense of enjoyment in it if we breathe deeply, sit with good posture, and treat it as a singular, focused, undistracted task. When we are fully absorbed in focused tasks we can even enter what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) called a state of flow.

Inspired by Dr. Levy’s work and recognizing how distractedness of social media, Dr. Nicole Damico and I developed mindfulness assignments for teacher candidates where they completed social media diaries and then took social media fasts to encourage more healthy, conscious, and intentional decision-making (Damico & Krutka, 2018). While this blog post largely focuses on how we can address email among faculty and staff, problems of distractedness, anxiety, and overload apply to students and should be taken up in our classes too.

Email Refusal

I accepted the offer to serve as interim department chair because I wanted to help create a workplace where people find joy in their work, are treated with dignity, and can pursue the critical educational and equity work to which our department is committed. My work thus far as chair has involved learning new systems, listening to the concerns and hopes of staff and faculty, and ensuring classes are staffed and people are paid.

Yet, as soon as my term began on August 1st emails launched their attack on my time from all directions. For the last few weeks I have typically worked 12-16 hour days, often without breaks and regularly skipping meals, while the most important tasks are still getting pushed to the next day (some of this workload is due to our department having many unfilled staff positions… an interrelated labor issue). When I participate in an hour-long meeting I know—consciously and unconsciously—that there will be 12 new emails added to my workload. If I have a busy day of meetings then I know that I will need hours to catch up on emails at night. This is, of course, unsustainable. A fellow department chair had warned me, “This isn’t a job that’s really possible.” This problem is the byproduct of an unplanned technological labor system out of control—without guardrails or limits. A recent study showed that leaders often either focus on their inbox OR larger transformative goals (Rosen et al., 2019). How do I ensure I can do more of the latter?

When thinking of how to make transformational change, I am inspired by Black and queer feminist scholars who refuse oppressive logics and structures. Referencing artist E. Jane, Legacy Russell (2020) called for “a NOPE that does not settle for a world or a social system that fails us” (p. 22). In this case, Russell is refusing the flattening of queer, Black bodies by white institutions. She uses the glitch as a metaphor for queer identities that don’t conform to oppressive systems. This feminist refusal reminds me to focus attention on the disproportionate effects of labor technologies (something that will require me to learn and listen this year) and also provoke the courage to challenge unjust systems by saying “NOPE.”

My efforts to change my workflow have shifted from an academic curiosity into an act of survival. I shouldn’t have to work this way and neither should you. I refuse. And I also recognize as a white-collar man seeking to change workflow systems, I must respect other acts of refusal to unjust systems inside and outside the department in which I labor.

Tentative Plans for Slow, Relational, and Purposeful Workflows

My aim at the departmental level is to create “guardrails” that ensure we have limits that prevent technology from invading areas of our lives where they don’t belong. I don’t want to tell other people how to do their job. I want to create conditions so they can pursue that work which they value most. One of the biggest challenges of enacting these change is that they, well, require work. But I hope the short term inconvenience of creating new systems will result in long term improvements. Because my workflow has been fast, impersonal, and unplanned, I aim to create a workflow that is slow, relational, and purposeful. Here some samples of the very first changes I made in my own workflow: 

• Reduce CCs: I asked staff and faculty only to CC me on emails when necessary. This was important because I expressed trust in them and started modeling limits.

• List discussion items instead of emailing: Instead of emailing colleagues every time we have a question, my staff and I now keep lists of discussion items. We schedule short meetings on a regular schedule and go through our lists together. In some cases, the item is resolved before we meet. An email was never truly necessary. We particularly save more complex topics to discuss in person. I have found these meetings enjoyable and I’ve quickly gotten to know staff well. Importantly, if our scheduled meeting isn’t needed, we cancel it. 

• Requests via form, not emails: Our departmental staff and I get a lot of emails. In many emails, three staff are included because the sender doesn’t know who to direct the issue to. To address this, we created a departmental request form (you can see it here) to replace email requests. The form approach to requests is slow because it discourages responding to the whims of our inboxes or the expectation of “toxic” same day requests. Instead, requests are added to a prioritized queue. It is relational because this approach lets us see when one staff member receives more requests so others can help them. It is purposeful because it allows staff to be more focused as we can go into the form and complete several related tasks together. This creates more opportunity to rethink how certain tasks are completed.

With all of these ideas, I sought to make decisions with staff and encouraged them to update me on how the changes were working for them. Any changes will have unintended effects and continued discussion and reflection will be needed along the way. I also created an infographic that I will share with faculty at our upcoming departmental meeting. These are not required actions, but tentative suggestions I hope will create a new consciousness about the cumulative effect of all our emails to each other.

Upon request from a colleague, I also recorded a video explaining how to do some of the things like “scheduling” an email, creating a “rule” for emails, or even just creating “list” for discussion. You can watch here.

Some academics may think deliberating on CCs and staff requests are too trivial of topics for our attention, but to paraphrase John Lennon, life is what happens to you, while you're busy sending emails. We must refuse the negative effects of email and restructure our days toward slow, relational, and purposeful workflows.

My past department chair was right to ask me to place limits on my weekend emails. Maybe she was able to see and feel this problem more clearly because she knew a time when her colleagues didn’t contact her in the middle of her weekend. She had lived without weekend emails. I hope to live without them too.

Thanks to Michelle Ciccone, Marie Heath, Kim Krutka, Jacob Pleasants, Zack Seitz, and Ryan Smits for feedback on these ideas. Please add your suggestions, stories, and ideas in the comments as I will be reassessing all these ideas throughout the year.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

Damico, N., & Krutka, D. G. (2018). Social media diaries and fasts: Educating for digital mindfulness with pre-service teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 73, 109-119.

Levy, D. M. (2016). Mindful tech: How to bring balance to our digital lives. Yale University Press.

Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world. Hachette.

Newport, C. (2019). Digital minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world. Penguin.

Newport, C. (2021). A world without email: Reimagining work in an age of communication overload. Penguin.

Rosen, C. C., Simon, L. S., Gajendran, R. S., Johnson, R. E., Lee, H. W., & Lin, S. H. J. (2019). Boxed in by your inbox: Implications of daily e-mail demands for managers’ leadership behaviors. Journal of Applied Psychology, 104(1), 19-33.

Russell, L. (2020). Glitch feminism: A manifesto. Verso.

Sillars, A., & Zorn, T. E. (2021). Hypernegative interpretation of negatively perceived email at work. Management Communication Quarterly, 35(2), 171-200.

Warzel, C., & Petersen, A. H. (2021). Out of office: The big problem and bigger promise of working from home. Knopf.

Zorn, T. E. (2021, August 19). It’s all too easy to be offended by an innocent work email — but there are ways to avoid it. The Conversation.