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MILITARY DUKIES In honor of Veterans Day, learn about the work of Duke employees Sean Foley and Frank Walsh while serving overseas.
N E WS YO U CA N U S E
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DOING GOOD Duke’s employee giving campaign expands to community programs through the DukeDurham Neighborhood Partnership.
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SUSTAINABLE DUKE Got an idea to make the campus more eco-friendly? Get money for the project through Duke’s Green Grant Fund.
November 2008
Overcoming E-mail Overload Sue Wasiolek, Duke’s dean of students and assistant vice president for student affairs, checks e-mail every six minutes. “An unanswered e-mail in my inbox screams at me,” she said.
FACULTY AND STAFF ARE SPENDING INCREASINGLY MORE TIME CHECKING, RESPONDING TO E-MAIL or Sue Wasiolek, an empty e-mail inbox provides the same sense of accomplishment as finishing an eight-mile run. As Duke’s dean of students and assistant vice president for student affairs, Wasiolek receives more than 200 e-mails daily. “An unanswered e-mail in my inbox screams at me,” Wasiolek said. “I don’t know if it’s an addiction or a self-imposed stressor, but I treat almost every e-mail as though it’s an overdue bill.” Wasiolek checks e-mail at least every six minutes, either on her laptop or iPhone. During meetings. While driving. At all hours of the night. And she’s not alone. Nearly half of all Americans say they’re hooked on e-mail, according to a recent AOL mail survey, and Duke staff and faculty are spending increasingly more of their workday checking and responding to it. The ease and convenience of email have prompted overuse, overdependence and information overload. But don’t blame technology for fragmented attention and growing anxiety, as today’s workers struggle to keep up with their constantly beeping inboxes. We have no one to blame but ourselves, experts say. “Most people let their e-mail manage them. They don’t manage it,” said Tim Pyatt, Duke’s university archivist and co-principal investigator of a four-year study of e-mail use at Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It’s just amazing how it’s come to dominate the workforce.” Pyatt now estimates that Duke faculty and staff spend as much as four hours a day on email, up from the average 111 minutes a day Duke staff reported in his fall 2002 survey. While tougher spam filters and other technological advances cut down on junk e-mail and help users better sort and search through the
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How much e-mail do you get?
50.6%
19.6%
(11 to 50 e-mails)
(51 to 100 e-mails)
Slightly more than half of Duke e-mail account addresses receive between 11 and 50 e-mail messages daily. Between students, faculty and staff, the average Duke e-mail address receives about 15 messages each day.
3.4%
24.9%
(101 to 250 e-mails)
.9%
(251 to 500 e-mails)
.5%
(501 to 1,000 e-mails)
.1%
(1,000+ e-mails)
(0 to 10 e-mails) Source: Duke’s Office of Information Technology
digital deluge, experts say the real problem with e-mail isn’t volume but etiquette and rising expectations in a 24/7 culture. “As technological performance gets better and servers deliver e-mail quickly, one side effect is that people have come to expect that other people will respond that quickly, too,” said Rob Carter, a consultant with Duke’s Office of Information Technology. Indeed, Duke users get fewer e-mails than they did just a year ago, due to tougher spam filtering implemented earlier this year. On an average day at Duke, OIT delivers about 1.5 million e-mails and blocks more than 22 million spam messages. Still, users feel overloaded because they rely too much on e-mail, using it as a tool for quick conversation and sharing comments on
2008 Gold Medal, Internal Periodical Staff Writing 2007 Bronze Medal, Print Internal Audience Tabloids/Newsletters
documents, instead of what it was designed to be: the electronic equivalent of a postal mailbox, Carter said. “It’s the equivalent of paper mail: a selfdocumenting, permanent record,” Carter said. “It’s designed to be reliable but not instant and conversational.” With the ease and convenience of e-mail, senders too often press “send” without considering the effect of their interruptions on others – and recipients feel a mounting sense of pressure to respond quickly. >> See E-MAIL OVERLOAD, PAGE 5
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