Verified by 
With the holiday season upon us, work-life balance (or “life-work integration,” as I am fonder of calling it) is a challenge for many of us in and out of academia. Perhaps the biggest challenge for many of us, the gift that never stops giving “agita” (as the Italians would say), is email.
While I chose to focus on email in academia for this post, email overload, stress, etiquette, and other related matters are clearly universal. Hopefully, a bit of information on the science of emailing can help this holiday season!
Email in academia
Email is an ever-present part of the job. As one study found based on interviews of faculty, email is often experienced as “spill over.” Email crosses the physical boundaries of the office to infect home life at all hours.
The impact of email is not always positive. A survey of academic faculty found that, for example, the sheer amount of email volume (often unnecessary in nature), in combination with student and colleague expectation of quick turnaround, causes work-related stress. Complicating the problem, email overload has been linked to higher burnout and lower work engagement.
No time is this more the case than near the end of a fall semester amid the holiday season. End-of-semester student angst, imminent final exams plus year-end reviews make for plenty of email volume.
To check or not to check my email over the holiday season?
The implicit, and often spoken, expectation is that faculty are email compulsives. We check and respond, around the clock—such is consistent with the customer service model of higher education.
Worsening the experience of academic email is the oft informal or poorly constructed nature of student emails. Combined with an expectation of quick turn around from our students, poor email etiquette can be a drag on our off time.
The issue of email etiquette has been studied empirically. One review on secondary education settings noted that poor email etiquette may negatively impact student-educator relationships. Another study elaborates on themes in student emails driving perceptions of (un)professionalism from students, finding that excessive informality and poor communication skills are often received by faculty as indicative of unprofessional communication.
As both article’s authors note, however, such poor communication is actually not the fault of students, as training in professional communication for them is often lacking before they arrive at university. Simply, faculty may need to socialize students not only when to expect our replies, but how to construct professional messaging.
The implication for email management over the holiday season? If your goal is to limit your amount of email checking for a break over the holiday season, set the expectation in writing with your students up front: Email responses will be slower over the holidays. You can do so via a pre-holiday message on the course learning management system (e.g., BlackBoard, Canvas), a simple email away message, and in-person notification during class time prior to a break. Students may actually benefit from such boundaries—seeing a professor or boss model work-life integration may encourage them to do the same!
Email and emotion: One more reason to limit email this holiday season
Another interesting factor in managing the urge to check email this holiday season is our emotions. Not surprisingly, email is heavily intertwined with our feelings.
For instance, a study featuring Australian academic faculty as participants found that worry was a large driver of email-related stress. It is likely that the more we worry about work-related tasks and the like, the more stress we will experience. Perhaps checking email provides fleeting alleviation of the stress. But this is likely fool’s gold—checking email may only worsen the stress or, at best, provide short-term relief. The best bet may be silencing email altogether over the holiday.
An interesting study by business scholars addressed the role of emotion we draw from sending emails. Two findings may inform our efforts toward holiday work-life integration. First, study authors found that sending email was more emotionally arousing than leaving a voicemail. We may simply be drawn to our email more and more to the extent we seek out emotions. Being aware of such impulses may help you stop compulsive checking.
Study investigators also investigated a specific type of communication: the utilitarian-focused email message. As defined in their study, a utilitarian communication is one where the goal “is to communicate information or coordinate behavior.” In other words, they are functional and are intended to be emotionless.
Utilitarian emails in particular are the type a manager or boss may share with their employees with particular informational updates (think about the deluge of pandemic-related instructions many of us have received from the boss) or task instructions (complete that mandatory online security training everyone!).
Utilitarian emails were found to generate more negative arousal compared to romantic emails—not surprising when you consider that work and other utilitarian tasks may frequently require addressing work assignments and other stressors. Additionally, compared to leaving a utilitarian voicemail, this type of email generated less positive language use.
The point? Sending and checking work-related email is rife with task-focused messages with potential negativity or, at a minimum, not very much positivity. Who wants to be dragged down by so much negativity over the holidays? I certainly don’t!
What to do if you need to check email?
A review of the literature on workplace email suggests the following strategies that may be helpful in limiting the negative impacts of email checking and overload (in this case, on your holiday joy!):
1. Schedule specific, time-limited slots to check and respond to email. Doing so can lessen the feeling of email addiction and enhance focus on other events and interactions.
2. Utilize email program rules to flag important messages and redirect to other folders that are of lower importance.
3. Use the email search feature to enhance efficiency is tackling high priority messages or messengers.
May you have good luck and a healthy dose of self-control with your email this holiday season. Cheers!
