A pace not dictated by electrons
Mark, Voida and Cardello report an empirical study in which email use was cut off for five workdays for a small group of information workers in an organisation. They combined quantitative measures such as computer log data with ethnographic methods, comparing a baseline of normal email use with the cutoff. Without email, people multitasked less and held a longer task focus, with fewer window switches and longer time in each window. Heart rate variability showed lower stress without email, and interviews were consistent with the measures.
Mark, Voida and Cardello report an empirical study in which email use was cut off for five workdays for a small group of information workers in an organisation. They combined quantitative measures such as computer log data with ethnographic methods, comparing a baseline of normal email use with the cutoff. Without email, people multitasked less and held a longer task focus, with fewer window switches and longer time in each window. Heart rate variability showed lower stress without email, and interviews were consistent with the measures.
Written from the abstract as shown on the OpenAlex record, read 2026-11-04.
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Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
: an empirical study of work without email.' Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12), 555-564. doi:10.1145/2207676.2207754.