It is the sociomaterial distinctiveness of e-mail that explains why it is a symbol of overload. Because e-mail functions to temporally decouple responses from messages sent, time away from continuous processing results in a build-up in the inbox. In order to maintain control, given the obligation to answer quickly, workers extended their workday. Their experience of meetings, teleconferences, and phone calls was vastly diferent. Because these activities are synchronous, requiring copresence for communication, they left no material reminder of unaccomplished work.
In sum, e-mail is singled out as a symbol of stress because of this entanglement of material, social, and quasimaterial factors surrounding its use. The authors conclude that the focus on e-mail masks the real causes of overload: new demands of work that crowd days and create unrealistic expectations about response time.
This study rightly interprets the temporal significance of e-mail as not simply due to the speed of data transmission, which conventional accounts would have us believe. Focusing on only one type of ICT, however, has its limitations. There is mounting evidence that people are more and more using a variety of simultaneous modes, being perpetually available via multimodal connectivity. Therefore, it is important to investigate the extent to which the resulting constant interruptions that fragment working time lead to harriedness.
Rethinking Interruptions at Work
Sylvia Ann Hewlett is known for her articles in places like Harvard Business Review on what she terms “extreme jobs,”—seventy-plus hour workweeks.26 She identifies six main “stressors” that cause exhaustion and burnout among people who work these long hours: rigidity combined with unpredictability, fast pace and tight deadlines, availability 24/7, constant travel, and work-related events outside regular work hours. But the sixth and chief stressor is the number of frustrating interruptions to the working day because of “canny communication devices.” With several screens on a worker’s desk, she says, an average of three minutes’ attention is given to any single task without interruption. This scrambling and jarring of attention kills any hope of serenity, and, at the end of the day, there’s usually a commute back to a domestic life of multitasking home and children.
Working with Constant Conne c tivity
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