A small trip to a hill station or a beach may help you unwind, but a new study has suggested all that you really need to destress yourself is to take a break from your email. Researchers from University of California Irvine and the US Army found that being cut off from work email significantly reduces stress and allows employees to focus better.
"We found that when you remove email from workers' lives, they multitask less and experience less stress," Gloria Mark, a UCI informatics professor and co-author of the study, was quoted as saying by LiveScience.
In conducting the study, the researchers attached heart rate monitors to workers in a suburban office setting, while software sensors detected how often they switched windows on their computer screen.
It was found that people who read email changed screens twice as often and were in
a steady 'high alert' state, with more constant heart rates, while those disconnected from email for five days experienced more natural, variable heart rates.
Those with no email reported feeling better able to do their jobs and stay on task, with fewer stressful and time-wasting interruptions, the researchers found.
Mark said the findings could be useful for boosting productivity; she suggests businesses consider controlling email login times, batching messages or other strategies.
"Email vacations on the job may be a good idea. We need to experiment with that," she said.
The only reported downside to being disconnected from email was somewhat of a feeling of isolation, the study found.
Employees not tuned in to their inboxes, though, were able to garner critical information from colleagues who were logged on.
The research was to be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Computer-Human Interaction Conference in Austin, Texas.