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Annals of Technology

E-mail Is Making Us Miserable

In an attempt to work more effectively, we’ve accidentally deployed an inhumane way to collaborate.

By Cal Newport
February 26, 2021

When employees are unhappy, they are more likely to burn out, leading to increased health-care costs and expensive
turnover. Photograph from Adobe Stock

I n early 2017, a French labor law went into effect that attempted to preserve the so-called right to disconnect. Companies
with fifty or more employees were required to negotiate specific policies about the use of e-mail after work hours, with
the goal of reducing the time that workers spent in their in-boxes during the evening or over the weekend. Myriam El
Khomri, the minister of labor at the time, justified the new law, in part, as a necessary step to reduce burnout. The law is
unwieldy, but it points toward a universal problem, one that’s become harder to avoid during the recent shift toward a more

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frenetic and improvisational approach to work: e-mail is making us miserable.

To study the effects of e-mail, a team led by researchers from the University of California, Irvine, hooked up forty office
workers to wireless heart-rate monitors for around twelve days. They recorded the subjects’ heart-rate variability, a common
technique for measuring mental stress. They also monitored the employees’ computer use, which allowed them to correlate
e-mail checks with stress levels. What they found would not surprise the French. “The longer one spends on email in [a
given] hour the higher is one’s stress for that hour,” the authors noted. In another study, researchers placed thermal cameras
below each subject’s computer monitor, allowing them to measure the tell-tale “heat blooms” on a person’s face that indicate
psychological distress. They discovered that batching in-box checks—a commonly suggested “solution” to improving one’s
experience with e-mail—is not necessarily a panacea. For those people who scored highly in the trait of neuroticism,
batching e-mails actually made them more stressed, perhaps because of worry about all of the urgent messages they were
ignoring. The researchers also found that people answered e-mails more quickly when under stress but with less care—a
text-analysis program called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count revealed that these anxious e-mails were more likely to
contain words that expressed anger. “While email use certainly saves people time effort in communicating, it also comes at a
cost, the authors of the two studies concluded. Their recommendation? To “suggest that organizations make a concerted
effort to cut down on email traffic.”

Other researchers have found similar connections between e-mail and unhappiness. A study, published in 2019, looked at
long-term trends in the health of a group of nearly five thousand Swedish workers. They found that repeated exposure to
“high information and communication technology demands” (translation: a need to be constantly connected) were associated
with “suboptimal” health outcomes. This trend persisted even after they adjusted the statistics for potential complicating
factors such as age, sex, socioeconomic status, health behavior, body-mass index, job strain, and social support. Of course, we
don’t really need data to capture something that so many of us feel intuitively. I recently surveyed the readers of my blog
about e-mail. “It’s slow and very frustrating. . . . I often feel like email is impersonal and a waste of time,” one respondent
said. “I’m frazzled—just keeping up,” another admitted. Some went further. “I feel an almost uncontrollable need to stop
what I’m doing to check email,” one person reported. “It makes me very depressed, anxious and frustrated.”

When employees are miserable, they perform worse. They’re also more likely, as the French labor minister warned, to burn
out, leading to increased health-care costs and expensive employee turnover. A Harvard Business School professor found
that giving a group of management consultants predictable time off from e-mail increased the percentage of them who
planned to stay at the firm “for the long term” from forty per cent to fifty-eight per cent. E-mail’s power to makes us
unhappy also has more philosophical implications. There are two hundred and thirty million knowledge workers in the
world, which includes, according to the Federal Reserve, more than a third of the U.S. workforce. If this massive population
is being made miserable by a slavish devotion to in-boxes and chat channels, then this adds up to a whole lot of global
miserableness! From a utilitarian perspective, this level of suffering cannot be ignored—especially if there is something that
we might be able to do to alleviate it.

Given these stakes, it’s all the more surprising that we spend so little time trying to understand the source of this discontent.
Many in the business community tend to dismiss the psychological toll from e-mail as an incidental side effect caused by bad
in-box habits or a weak constitution. I’ve come to believe, however, that much deeper forces are at play in generating our
mismatch with this tool, including some that get at the very core of what drives us as humans.

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T
he need to interact with each other is one of the strongest motivational forces that humans experience. As the
psychologist Matthew Lieberman explains in his book “Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect,” the social
networks encoded in our neurons are linked to our pain systems, creating the intense feelings of heartbreak that we feel
when someone close to us dies, or the total desolation that we might experience when we are isolated from other people for
too long. “These social adaptations are central to making us the most successful species on earth,” Lieberman writes.

The flip side of an evolutionary obsession with social interaction is a corresponding feeling of distress when it’s thwarted.
Much in the same way that our attraction to food is coupled with the gnawing sensation of hunger in its absence, our
instinct to connect is accompanied by an anxious unease when we neglect these interactions. This matters in the office,
because an unfortunate side effect of overwhelming e-mail communication is that it constantly exposes you to exactly this
form of social distress. A frenetic approach to professional collaboration generates messages faster than you can keep up—
you finish one response only to find that three more have arrived in the interim, and, while you are at home at night, or over
the weekend, or when you are on vacation, you cannot escape the awareness that the missives in your in-box are piling up
ever thicker in your absence.

When you skip a meal, telling your rumbling stomach that food is coming later in the day, and therefore that it has no
reason to fear starvation, doesn’t alleviate the powerful sensation of hunger. Similarly, explaining to your brain that the
neglected interactions reflected by your overfilled in-box have little to do with the health of your relationships doesn’t seem
to prevent a corresponding sense of background anxiety. We can actually measure this triumph of ancient social drives over
the rational modern brain in the laboratory. In one particularly devious study, researchers figured out how to discreetly assess
our psychological response to thwarted digital connection. Subjects were brought into a room to work on word puzzles.
They were told that, as part of the experiment, the researcher also wanted to test out a wireless blood-pressure monitor. The
subject is left to work on the puzzles, and, after a few minutes, the researcher returns to the room and explains that the
subject’s smartphone is creating “interference” with the wireless signal, so they need to move the phone to a table four feet
away—still within earshot, but out of reach. After a few more minutes of working on a puzzle, the researcher covertly calls
the subject’s phone. At this point, the subject is trying to solve the word puzzle while hearing his or her phone ringing from
across the room, but is prevented from getting it because of a previous warning from the researcher that it is important not
to get up “for any reason.”

During this entire charade, the wireless monitor is tracking the subject’s physiological state by measuring blood pressure and
heart rate, allowing the researchers to closely monitor the effect of the phone separation. The results are predictable. During
the periods when the phone is ringing across the room, indicators of stress and anxiety in the subject jumped higher.
Similarly, self-reported stress rose and self-reported pleasantness fell. Performance on the word-search puzzle decreased
during the period of unanswered ringing.

Rationally speaking, the subjects in this experiment knew that missing a call was not a crisis, as people miss calls all the time,
and they were clearly engaged in something more important in the moment. Indeed, in many cases, the subject’s phone had
already been set to silence mode, which the researchers surreptitiously turned off as they moved the phone across the room.
This means that the subjects had already planned on missing any calls or messages that arrived during the experiment. But
this rational understanding was no match for the underlying evolutionary pressures that have ingrained the idea that
ignoring a potential connection is a really bad idea. The subjects were bathed in anxiety while their rational minds, if they
had been asked, would have likely responded that there was nothing going on in the laboratory worth worrying about.

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The missed connections in an ever-filling e-mail in-box sound these same Paleolithic alarm bells—regardless of our best
attempts to convince ourselves that this unanswered communication isn’t critical. This effect is so strong that when Arianna
Huffington’s company, Thrive Global, explored how to free its employees from this anxiety while they were on vacation
(when the knowledge of accumulating messages becomes particularly acute), it ended up experimenting with an extreme
solution, called Thrive Away. If a Thrive employee sends an e-mail to a colleague who is on vacation, the sender receives a
note that the colleague is away and the message is automatically deleted. In theory, a simple vacation auto-responder should
be sufficient—as it tells people sending a message not to expect a reply until the recipient returns—but logic is subservient in
this situation. No matter what the expectations, the awareness that there are messages waiting somewhere triggers anxiety,
ruining the potential relaxation of a person’s time off. The only cure is to prevent the messages from arriving altogether.
Huffington said, “The key is not just that the tool is creating a wall between you and your email; it’s that it frees you from
the mounting anxiety of having a mounting pile of emails waiting for you on your return—the stress of which mitigates the
benefits of disconnecting in the first place.”

A tool like Thrive Away might temporarily alleviate the social stress of the way that we work, but we cannot ignore the fifty
or so weeks a year when we’re not on vacation. As long as we remain committed to a workflow based on constant,
improvised messaging, we will remain in a state of low-grade anxiety. To return to our motivating question, there are many
reasons why e-mail makes us miserable. It creates, for example, a tortuous cycle that increases the amount of work on our
plate while simultaneously thwarting, through constant distraction, our ability to accomplish it effectively. We’re also, it turns
out, really bad at communicating clearly through a purely written medium—all kinds of nuances are lost, especially sarcasm,
which leads to frustrating misunderstandings and confused exchanges. But lurking beneath these surface depredations is a
more fundamental concern. The sheer volume of communication generated by modern professional e-mail directly conflicts
with our ancient social circuits. We’re miserable, in other words, because we’ve accidentally deployed a literally inhumane
way to collaborate.

U nderstanding these forces provides more than just catharsis, as these efforts can also help us to better understand what
is needed to improve our professional culture. In recent years, I’ve been advocating for wider use of shared project-
management systems that simplify the task of identifying who is working on what and how it is going. If you combine these
systems with regular, short status meetings, you can significantly reduce the number of back-and-forth messages required to
organize a team. When viewed abstractly, the overhead of implementing such a system might seem wasteful, given that tools
like e-mail are much simpler and more flexible. But when this structured approach is considered in the context of how
communication overload induces misery, it suddenly makes more sense.

More generally, once you move past just optimizing for speed or convenience, and begin instead to look for ways to
minimize unstructured communication, numerous potential innovations emerge. The software-development company
Basecamp, for example, makes use of regularly scheduled office hours: if someone has a technical question for a given expert,
he or she can’t just shoot an e-mail but has to wait until the expert’s next office hours to make a query. In a book about
Basecamp’s workplace culture, published in 2018, the co-founders admitted that, at first, they were worried that their
employees wouldn’t put up with having to wait to talk to an expert, instead of just “pinging” the person in the moment.
Their concerns were unfounded. “It turns out that waiting is no big deal most of the time,” they write. “But the time and
control regained by our experts is a huge deal.”

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Another innovation that I’ve seen have been successful experiments in moving past the paradigm of associating e-mail
addresses with individuals. When an address is instead assigned to a specific client, or to a specific type of request, and
monitored by multiple different employees, it can go a long way to relieving the deeply-ingrained anxiety that we are
ignoring those who need us.

The history of technology is littered with cautionary tales of what goes wrong when new tools yield superficial convenience,
but are poorly matched with fundamental human nature. E-mail is arguably one of the best examples of such unintentional
consequences in recent history. It’s useful, of course, that we can communicate instantaneously, with almost no friction or
cost. But humans are not network routers. Just because it’s possible for us to send and receive messages incessantly through
our waking hours doesn’t mean that it is a sustainable way to exist. Technologies serve us best when we deploy their new
efficiencies with intention, with an aim to improve the human condition. We shouldn’t banish e-mail, but we can no longer
allow it to be used in such a way that guarantees our misery.

This excerpt is drawn from “A World Without Email,” by Cal Newport, out in March from Portfolio.

Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University.

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