From the issue dated May 19, 2006

The E-genda Stalks an Administrator on Vacation

By MICHAEL BUGEJA

It was one of those months in an administrator's life when everything demanded attention at once: budget plans, student appeals, personnel decisions, medical issues, missed research deadlines, and more, not to mention an impatient family whose vacation had been postponed twice.

Then, after I had finally closed my office door and arrived home late on a Friday, I did something foolish. As soon as the dinner plates were cleared, and my wife and children preoccupied with gardening and games, I checked my e-mail messages, answering one last one from a faculty member in an electronic dialogue that would continue through the weekend and end awkwardly.

The nature of the exchange is not important. My decision to check and respond to e-mail after a 60-hour week was questionable administrative conduct and lamentable spousal and parental behavior.

I also should have known better, having written a book on the blurring of work-home boundaries because of omnipresent communication tools that can be as addictive as any narcotic. If that sounds like hyperbole, you may be addicted, too, especially if you are an administrator who believes the academic world revolves around your decisions.

Urgent BlackBerry SMS alert: It doesn't.

That is not to say that department heads and program directors do not earn their keep. They just don't earn it every waking minute of every day from myriad wireless locations.

To be fair, department and program chiefs have the toughest jobs in academe because they have to advocate for their faculties and acquiesce to their deans, finding a middle ground between those polarities. That requires talent, tact, and timing, which e-mail can obliterate when used unwisely or inopportunely.

Not only is the medium the message; at many institutions, it sets the administrative agenda, too.

To gauge the impact of e-mail, do a search by relevance in The Chronicle's archives. I did so on March 21, using the key word "e-mail," and retrieved close to 900 references for the past three years. We're so accustomed to e-mail upheavals that we can discern the issues reported in many of these articles merely by scanning such headlines as "Who Owns Professors' E-Mail Messages?" or "Facing Down the E-Maelstrom" or "Academic Flame Wars."

As these and dozens of other articles attest, e-mail can exacerbate conflicts in academe, especially when administrators overuse it to circumvent the interactivity of meetings or the courtesy of office visits. E-mail is good at disseminating minutes of meetings that took place in real time and place, but it was never designed as a frame through which we decide personnel issues, file grievances, and share governance and opinions about governance, with others duly copied, complicating any hope of resolution.

Before the technology explosion of the mid- to late 1990s, personnel disputes were largely interpersonal — colleagues complaining about an encounter in a real place and in linear time. Now such cases often contain an e-mail component such as an offending reference or inappropriate image. E-mail intensifies incivility because harsh or tactless language may come easily in virtual habitats with one party isolated at odd hours in front of a computer screen rather than face to face with someone during regular business hours. Yet, in almost every case, resolution is achieved only through in-person intervention.

It is easy on the Web to draw a line in the digital sand, says Robert B. Holmes, ombudsman at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor: "You're isolated alone at your computer, and you may just say the first thing that comes to your mind."

Holmes, a former director of human-resource development with a background in organizational behavior, has his own e-mail rules. He tries never to use the medium to convey even "a semblance of bad news," preferring to do that face to face, and waits before responding to testy e-mails. "I'm human, too," he says. "In the morning, I see that my correspondence doesn't have to be venomous. I will have calmed down. My heartbeat will have slowed."

Last summer I realized it was time for me to devise new e-mail rules before embarking on that family vacation. I decided to conduct a self-exploratory study. Research question: What are the consequences for an administrator who does not read or send e-mail for two consecutive weeks?

To find out, I set my "away message" notifying others when I would return to the office, shut off my computer, packed my bags, apologized to my wife, Diane, for having delayed the vacation, and loaded my two boys, Shane and Mikayle, into the van. We set off for Spirit Lake, Iowa, one of the most picturesque areas in the state, with tranquil blue water reflecting expansive prairie skies. Amid this scenery, with frolicking boys and contented spouse, all I could think about was e-mail.

I suffered the symptoms of deprivation. I was nervous playing with the boys on the beach or lounging at the spa. I had trouble concentrating and became depressed, irritable, and restless — no fun for Diane. For the first 72 hours, I had headaches that kept me awake at night so that I was drowsy during the day. Without warning, I'd become panicky, imagining my e-mail queue filling up with urgent red flags. I overate to compensate, and my stomach ached continuously.

These also happen to be symptoms of nicotine withdrawal.

A couple of years ago, Yahoo and a media agency commissioned a study to determine just how dependent we are on e-mail and Web browsing. For two weeks, 28 people with broadband connections kept journals about their experiences being deprived of online access outside of work.

A report in The Christian Science Monitor noted that it was "a sign of the times" that to recruit people to participate in the study and undergo digital deprivation, researchers paid as much as $950 per household. "In video diaries," the Monitor said, "participants talked about feeling 'withdrawal' as they resisted the temptation to log on."

Some respondents suffered many of the symptoms that I did at Spirit Lake. One woman said she was "cringing" and that the experience was "almost like a fast." Another said he was so anxious to get to his computer that he was "even looking forward to seeing spam."

So was I by the end of the third day of vacation. The question is, why?

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes in his best-selling book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience that jobs are easier to enjoy than free time. Work, he adds, has "built-in goals, feedback, rites, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one's work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed."

Maybe that was true in 1990, when Flow was first published and when e-mail did not set the day's agenda, blurring the line between home and work. In the past, we may have taken our jobs home with us in briefcases to read memos in the lamplight of the living room, but our workload didn't compound hourly with in boxes filling up with digital mail and assorted attachments — interspersed with spam, phishing attempts, and scores of other scams.

E-mail increasingly dominates our workday. A recent survey conducted by the Iowa Association of Business and Industry with a training company, and published in my local newspaper, The Ames Tribune, noted these findings:

• "Sixty-six percent of respondents indicated that they receive between 30 and 50 e-mails each day."

• "A third indicated they receive more than 50 e-mails each business day."

• "Seventy-seven percent reported that they spend between one and three hours each day sorting, dumping, answering, and otherwise processing e-mail."

• Respondents anticipated quick replies to their electronic messages, with 56 percent expecting a response within a day and almost one-third within two to four hours.

• Many respondents reportedly "echoed a common nightmare in returning from a vacation to find hundreds of messages clogging their in box."

By the fourth day of my vacation, my withdrawal symptoms started to ease. Slowly the natural beauty of Spirit Lake took hold, deleting digital imagery of smiley faces and red flags and replacing them with sailboats and orange sunsets. The only flags in view were on poles, snapping in the brisk summer breeze.

However, as the end of our vacation neared, e-mail dominated my thoughts again. I was certain that consequences would be extreme, that my queue would contain disturbing messages about my inaccessibility, requiring weeks to rebuild trust.

On the Monday of my return, I reminded myself that this was an experiment and devised a Likert scale to code the hundreds of messages that I anticipated. I took a deep breath and downloaded 273 e-mail messages — fairly light, considering that I typically receive more than 60 per day. The "away message" must have gotten the idea across that I really was away, not pretending to be, reading and responding to e-mail in my skivvies in the wee hours.

It took me almost six hours to log and code these data. The results:

• 0 percent of the messages were disturbing

• 4 percent were somewhat disturbing

• 75 percent were routine

• 15 percent were somewhat affirming

• 6 percent were affirming

In March I did the same experiment during 10 days of e-mail-free spring break, retesting validity. I downloaded and coded 203 messages with these results:

• 0 percent of the messages were disturbing

• 3 percent were somewhat disturbing

• 85 percent were routine

• 10 percent were somewhat affirming

• 2 percent were affirming

The only real change over eight months was a spike in phishing missives, from 4 percent of the total in August 2005 to 33 percent in March 2006. (Some might label phishing e-mails "disturbing," but I coded them "routine" because of their frequency.)

As you can see, most of the e-mails were routine — announcements, spam, and the like.

Reviewing the data from the first experiment, I marked these messages "somewhat disturbing": a financing request denied, a missed deadline for a paper submission, a committee matter, a scheduling problem with an assistantship, a missed grading deadline, a budget cut to an account, an editor requesting a rewrite of an essay, pornographic spam, administrative paperwork, and word of the illness of an acquaintance's family member.

Messages that were somewhat affirming included a few guest-speaker confirmations, invitations to important functions, a successful fact check of an article, several upbeat messages from alumni and faculty members praising or reporting recent scholarly achievements, a message from my niece, several cheery notes from former colleagues, and two interview requests about my research.

The affirming e-mails included a funny note from a colleague about vacations, a note from my dean encouraging me to take time off, a message from a former boss, and several updates from senior professors solving problems themselves in the absence of the director, working closely with the associate director and office manager.

Our journalism school was running well because of shared governance. (Administrators sometimes forget that shared responsibility is the beauty of this time-honored precept.)

Could it be that e-mail not only was setting my administrative agenda but also complicating it, adding an element of urgency that made routine problems seem like emergencies? Could it be that e-mail may download but not "flow" in the psychological sense? After all, Csikszentmihalyi's theory implies that we lose ourselves in work through creativity and concentration. Writing this essay is an example of "flow." Listening to the ping of e-mail interrupts that flow, breaking concentration and undermining creativity.

Suffice to say, I changed my e-mail habits after analyzing data from my experiment. First, I have come to understand what e-mail does best. For instance, it can schedule agendas, distribute materials, and help assemble data to complete reports in record time. The medium has both good and bad attributes, and knowing them is the first step toward controlling its presence in one's life.

Toward that end, I am learning to leave the office each day and not check e-mail until the following morning. I also try to refrain from checking e-mail Friday evening through Monday morning, even when I am working weekends on administration or research. If there is a genuine emergency, e-mail is the wrong medium to address it anyway, and someone will contact me by telephone or in person.

Also, an administrator ought not to be doing business by e-mail at midnight in sleepwear. Guideline: If you would not deliver the message in person, according to how you are dressed, then don't do so electronically.

So now on most days, I arrive in my office with my morning coffee before downloading dozens of messages, most routine. On my desk are file folders full of data, reports, and correspondence. This cuts down on e-mail because I am not responding from home initially and then following up at the office where I have access to information. I've also adopted Holmes's rule about not using e-mail to convey even a semblance of bad news.

Sure, I have lapses. But now I am conscious of them and so can correct my behavior. Also, there are times after hours when an editor or a colleague will need an answer urgently on e-mail. Or I may need their responses to meet a deadline. On those occasions, I open or reply to those select messages without being distracted by names or topics of other e-mails.

I have been doing this for eight months now, without consequence. Lines between home and work are defined by geography rather than by Eudora. I spend more time with my family, especially outdoors, which improves my health and my outlook. My weeknights and weekends seem much longer because I am living by the biological clock rather than the digital one.

Michael Bugeja, director of the journalism school at Iowa State University, is the author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age (Oxford University Press, 2005).