Email intrusion into daily life

THE EXPERTS all seem to agree ... time spent looking at emails is reducing productivity.

It is bad for health and family life, too, with the checking of inboxes while on holiday being labelled "sick" by Sir Cary Cooper, Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University.

I expect that is only the half of the story and that there is an effect on the nation's blood pressure as well. Try talking to a teenager who has a mobile phone to hand. Once upon a time, they could only show their irritation by looking out of the window, something so obviously rude that you could resort to shouting, or violence or throwing them out of the house or one of those other remedies so beloved by books on parenting.

Now it is different. "No, dad - I am listening but I just need to deal with this text at the same time. Of course, I can do two things at once - I'm not stupid, you know."

Never mind that the examiners thought different; never mind that successive schools gave up in disgust; the picture is one of modern progressive youth confronting an aged dinosaur - and a dinosaur with high blood pressure to boot.

But a surfeit of emails is not just a risk to health. It also changes the function of the emails themselves. They cease to be a form of communication and become a way of covering the backside should things go wrong - rather like the risk warnings in a company prospectus. You know the system there. On about page 200, after 25 anodyne warnings of the "investors are reminded that markets can go down as well as up" variety you come across warning 26: "The main market for the company's credit insurance product is Greece, where results might be affected by financial instability." Perfect. The investor who did not read this far has only himself to blame but not many investors will actually be put off because they won't get to it. The public has been warned ... but not warned, as it were. You can achieve much the same effect with an email to your boss, assuming he is the sort who receives too many of them.

WAIT for a day when he is particularly busy - ideally with a lunch with someone rather attractive thrown in - then write a long wordy email in adminspeak which wanders about aimlessly for several paragraphs and explains the decision you want covered at page three.

End it with the words: "Let me know if you have a problem with this" and fire it off just before his lunch appointment. Job done.

Your decision won't be challenged but, should it go pear-shaped, you put on your most innocent expression and exclaim: "But I checked with you, don't you read your emails?"

Most of us get too many emails but our problems are put in perspective by the owner of a software company who claimed to receive a daily dose of about 3000. How did he deal with them without going mad? Simple, he deleted all of them all unread on arriving at the office. As he put it: "Anyone who wants me to read their message had better write me a letter." For his staff to send him an email was a sackable offence.

For those who work for themselves or in small groups, the internal email is less of a problem. Here stress levels are maintained in quite a different way - by the use of passwords to cover every bit of usable technology. In a big office, there will be an IT department to deal with this but, if you are responsible for your own computer, navigating the passwords is about as easy as finding your way out of the minotaur's lair.

You begin by choosing the password to your computer itself. All the books say that you must not write it down, so it has to be something you can remember. You remember reading The Lord of the Rings and the message: "Speak, friend and enter" over the door to Khazad-dum. The password there was "friend" of course, so you follow the same logic and make yours "password".

So far so good, but you also need passwords for Microsoft, the i-cloud, your website and many other things - including the local theatre. Presumably the latter is to guard against the risk that a fugitive from justice will ring up, book tickets in your name, pay for them with his own credit card and sit incognito in your seat, thus cleverly laundering his identity.

Anyway, you come up with the brilliant scheme of always using the word "password" and following it with a letter of the alphabet. That works well until you discover that some of the passwords need a capital letter. Very well, those ones can begin "Password"; then there are others which need a number, okay "Password 1,2 etc".

But yet other sites will reject even this password as "weak", presumably as a way of demonstrating the sort of bare-chested virility more commonly associated with a Russian leader. By the end, you give up completely and start your use of each program by going through the forgotten password procedure. That really knocks your productivity for six.

Unlike emails, passwords have been with us for a long time and you wonder how it worked in Roman times. When a Roman centurion, returning to camp from a drunken night out in honour of Bacchus, found that he couldn't remember the password and tried "Ave Caesar", was he met with the reply "No, it's Ave underscore Caesar, you enemy spy!" followed by a fatal spear thrust? No, I suppose not. Passwords were easier then. Perhaps that's as well. After all the penalty for forgetting them was immeasurably higher.

-John Watson writes from Islington in London