I was trying to get my email Inbox down to zero for the weekend, and though I was making good progress, I felt a mounting sense of stress. Realizing this, I stopped to introspect: why stress? Here I was, going down the list of incoming messages, deleting the useless ones and addressing the more important stuff, and generally doing a good job. Why stress, rather than a feeling of accomplishment?

So I examined more closely what I was doing in the process, and I realized that many of the emails were carrying “gifts” of additional activities. One message might direct my attention to a possibly interesting video on YouTube; I’d then go and look at it. The next mail might ask me to attend a seminar, providing a link to the agenda; I’d click the link and go check it out. And maybe I’d need to know where the location was, so I’d go into Google Maps to check that too; then, if I decided to attend, I’d go to another link to confirm, and put an item on my calendar. The next message would be that someone wants to connect to me on LinkedIn; off I’d go to check this person’s profile. And so on.

Compare this to the process of reading incoming mail in the old days. There too you had an Inbox – a tray marked IN – and you’d go down its content item by item. But those items would be much more self-contained. None of them would cause you to branch out to a far away place to check more information; if you needed information, it was right there in the envelope. In today’s multitasking world, you keep making short forays into the infinite Web, jumping from mode to mode, from medium to medium, back and forth… I’m no psychologist, but I suspect that this activity format is part of the reason why email processing is more stressing than just slitting envelopes, reading the content and maybe jotting a directive to one’s assistant (or to oneself) about what to do with it.

What do you think?