Am I addicted to email? If not I am most definitely addicted to my rss reader. According to behavior psychologists I get the same type of rush or high when I receive a new email, or discover a new blog post in my rss feedreader, as gamblers get when they receive a slot machine payout or win a pot in poker. And this addiction is killing my productivity.
According to Michael Shanks, an archaeologist and a professor of design at Stanford University, "Primary conditioning mechanism" is the inclusion of relatively small payouts in slot machine gameplay. These small payouts provide positive reinforcement to the player, a phenomenon that has been studied extensively by psychologist BF Skinner in experiments with rats. Skinner placed a rat in a box, with a lever at one end that would dispense a pellet of food. When, it its random behavior, the rat accidentally pushes the lever, the pellet of food reinforces this behavior. Soon the rat does nothing but push the lever repeatedly, expecting a pellet of food."
The similarities do not end at the intermittent nature of the positive reinforcement. Like in slot machine play the most important aspect of my email stimuli is the relative frequency of the almost jackpot. I am not drawn to check my email on a near constant basis for the countless "silly questions", "touching base", or "status updates". I am looking for the jackpot of emails. The one that comes along every couple of days. The one that says, "Jonathan here is some really good news", or even in a twisted sort of way "Jonathan here is some really bad news".
This type of behavioral response carries over to other things as well. Why do I drop whatever I am working on, no matter how important it is, to jump and answer the phone or respond to IM? Stowe Boyd says that my time is not my own, but belongs to My Network (friends, coworkers, etc). Am I really most valuable as a cog working in unison towards the greater good of my group. I think the answer for many professions is increasingly becoming yes. The key to this dilemma is in striking a balance between being available to communicate to move the project along, and having the non-interrupted groove or flow time. ("Groove or flow time" is what I call the time that only happens when you have enough time to really get into a groove or flow while working on something)
For me and my personal productivity problems, I am going to try some of the suggestion recently offered by Marc Andressen of Netscape fame.
My vows are as follows: (note, I highly doubt that I will be able to break my "addictions" so easily. So these "vows" are really more "things I am going to try")
1. Only checking my email two time per day. The rest of the time my email client will be turned off. That also includes my Crackberry.
2. I will only check my rss feedreader in the morning. I will only read the posts that are relevent or interesting to me.
3. I will check and respond to voice-mail 2x per day.
4. I will leave my email Inbox empty at the end of every workday.
5. I will buy a white-board and hang it up in my line of sight and write on it and rank things I want to accomplish in order of importance. I will work on what is most important first.
Note: I will not change my IM behavior. IM provides immediate feedback for My Network and typically does not disrupt my groove or flow time. In otherwords I love my IM and it's one addiction I am not willing to part with.
