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September 10, 2008 11:05 AM PDT

E-mail is as addictive as gambling

by Dave Rosenberg
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Just when you finally came to terms with your e-mail addiction, blogs came along, then IM, then Twitter, and now we are all zombies. As it turns out, e-mail is a dangerous distraction.

In a study last year, Dr. Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by e-mail. So people who check their e-mail every five minutes waste 8 1/2 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.

I would suspect that Twitter and random IMs must double the wasted time leading to 17 hours a week of figuring out what you were just doing. This constant distraction is similar to gambling, heeding to a "variable interval reinforcement schedule" which is the same feeling you get from playing a slot machine.

"This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with e-mail, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful--an invite out or maybe some juicy gossip--and I get a reward." This is enough to make it difficult for us to resist checking e-mail, even when we've only just looked. The obvious solution is to process e-mail in batches, but this is difficult. One company delayed delivery by five minutes, but had so many complaints that they had to revert to instantaneous delivery. People knew that there were e-mails there and chafed at the bit to get hold of them.

As an interesting contrast, the NY Times published a piece earlier this week about the Brave New World of Digital Intimacy that helps to explain how all this connectivity actually might be making our lives better.

Today I am on blog, Twitter, IM, cell phone, and three different e-mail accounts...at least until I get to the casino.

Dave Rosenberg dishes up "Software, Interrupted" with nearly 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to multiple start-up IPOs to open-source enterprise software companies. He is co-founder of MuleSource and currently serves as the general manager of Hardy Way. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can contact Dave via e-mail at softwareinterrupted@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @daveofdoom.
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by Sweetpatootie September 10, 2008 4:33 PM PDT
It's true. The Internet as a whole is wayyyyyy worse than being addicted to most drugs....
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by ReinaR005 August 20, 2009 3:33 AM PDT
Thanks for this article! It was great! Anyway, for those people that play the New Jersey Lottery, you better hope that you get the winning ticket ? because MegaMillions is not kidding around this time. The New Jersey Lottery jackpot just went up from $170 million to $207 million, and no winner has yet declared or been found. MegaMillions, the lottery game, is played in over a dozen states, and despite criticism for encouraging gambling, the programs go to fund schools and other state agencies ? so in essence, people are gambling almost for charity ? and the chance to get filthy rich! A person, or even if there are ten people that win the <a rev="vote for" title="New Jersey Lottery MegaMillions | Now With More Millions!" href="http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2009/08/19/jersey-lottery-megamillions-millions/ ">New Jersey Lottery</a> for that amount ? will certainly never need no fax payday loans again.
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by ReinaR005 August 20, 2009 3:33 AM PDT
For those people that play the New Jersey Lottery, you better hope that you get the winning ticket ? because MegaMillions is not kidding around this time. The New Jersey Lottery jackpot just went up from $170 million to $207 million, and no winner has yet declared or been found. MegaMillions, the lottery game, is played in over a dozen states, and despite criticism for encouraging gambling, the programs go to fund schools and other state agencies ? so in essence, people are gambling almost for charity ? and the chance to get filthy rich! A person, or even if there are ten people that win the New Jersey Lottery for that amount ? will certainly never need no fax payday loans again. For more readings, please visit http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2009/08/19/jersey-lottery-megamillions-millions/
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About Software, Interrupted

In "Software, Interrupted," Dave Rosenberg discusses disruption in the software market, as well as the products and services that keep business technology norms in perpetual flux.

With nearly 15 years of technology and marketing experience spanning from Bell Labs to multiple start-up IPOs, Dave co-founded open-source software company MuleSource and now serves as general manager of Hardy Way. He also happens to be a U.S. patent holder and a workaholic. Technology is his best friend and mortal enemy.

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