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The Average User Checks Email 5.6 Hours Per Weekday
- vijaybritto 8y agoWhat?! No. I saw it like 15 mins barely. It's all slack now.
- Sharlin 8y agoThough it doesn't help at all if all the interruptions just move to slack, a realtime chat environment may just make messages feel even more urgent to react to than email...
- vijaybritto 8y agoslack is not disrupting my attention a lot because I have subscribed only to direct messages and bugs assigned to me directly by QA. I make sure I reduce subscriptions as much as possible by muting most of the channels.
- Sharlin 8y agoYeah, that's how it should be. But I'm sure for many it's not.
- vidarh 8y agoFavourite pet peeve: People who mention me or DM me to get my attention, and then patiently waits for a response before asking the non-critical question they could just have typed out and left for me to deal with when I have time. That kind of behaviour seems to be considered acceptable on realtime environments, and it's 10 times more disruptive than sending an e-mail..
- linuxlizard 8y agoI could easily burn my entire day following our Slack channels. Email is barely a blip anymore.
- kaffeemitsahne 8y agoIsn't handling documents one of the main tasks in an office job? I don't see the big deal with spending a few hours per day on one of your core tasks.
- Sharlin 8y agoNo, unless your job is specifically about communicating with people via email. Which definitely isn't a programmer's job, for example.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoUnless you work a monstrous hybrid / support / leadership role that sees you both doing long term project work, mentoring, and immediate fixes. I remember my last day with an uninterrupted of 4 hours of flow was about a month ago. That was a super productive day. I still think about it sometimes.
- blattimwind 8y ago> I still think about it sometimes. Picture it... Sicily, 1922.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoIt's in Sepia tones and everything.
- WilliamEdward 8y agoIf you work for 8 hours, 9am to 5pm, 5.6 hours is not "a few hours".
- codingdave 8y agoWhether or not this is bad depends entirely on what you do for a living. For coders, sure, that average would be excessive. For admin support, tech support, or other roles where communication is a majority of their job? Maybe not.
- 7000skeletons 8y agoVery true. I've done admin/community management roles in the past, and it's safe to say that vast majority of work in such areas involves checking/replying to emails.
- jerf 8y agoThat's ludicrous and unbelievable. Either the standard deviation is small, which implies that almost everybody does that, or the standard deviation is large, which implies there's a significant percentage of people spending more than 8 hours a day checking email. Either way I suspect this is more a demonstration of the unreliability of self-reporting than an accurate reflection of reality. Either that, or there's a significant deviation between what is being reported and what the wording of the question was on the survey. (I can imagine spending hours a day doing a task you received over email, but if your boss asks you for a report of something or other over email and you spend three hours assembling it, that could be "three hours related to email" but not "three hours checking email".)
- thrower123 8y agoIf anything, that seems low. I'm a programmer, and I have days I'm completely chewed up doing email all day long. Other people, wrangling email is practically their entire job.
- Sharlin 8y agoThat's just ridiculous, to a programmer. I don't remember when I have last received something critical by email, never mind hours worth of it. They're all either automated notifications or company-level announcements; neither requires immediate action, or often any action at all.
- thrower123 8y agoYou must be blessed enough not to have to do any support or field questions from customers...
- WilliamEdward 8y agoHow is that the job of a programmer and not tech support? And how is this being done by so many people that the average of 5.6 hours makes sense?
- hyperpape 8y agoAt my company, there is an list where problems that can't be handled by tech support or customer facing people get raised. Cases where the documentation is unclear or absent, things that can't be obviously classified as bugs, etc. Making a habit of answering those is a great way to learn about the system you're working on. That said, I don't spend hours on it.
- BeetleB 8y agoTech support? What's that? Most software is written for internal company use. In my last job, the software we wrote was used by hundreds of users in my company. No way is the company going to hire tech support people for internal software. We were very aggressive in ensuring we don't get support questions all the time. We made some of the customers our tech support. Every "domain" of our software had experts amongst our users. So if any user had a question about performing X with our libraries, they were to contact the customer who was an expert in doing X. If he couldn't help, then that expert would contact us. Direct questions to us from new users were just replied to with "Check with the experts first". This helped a lot in cutting down requests. But most companies/orgs, in my experience, will not be supportive of that type of tech support. We had to be very aggressive in it, and we had the backing of our and the users' department heads.
- ngrilly 8y ago5.6 hours per weekday! That seems too much to be true. If we work 8 hours, we're left with 2.4 hours to do something else than checking emails.
- Hoasi 8y agoIt seems believable. It is sad but for many people, work still means spending a lot of time emailing. Some people don't do much beside emailing about meetings, calling about meetings, and actual meetings.
- xboxnolifes 8y agoWork aside, how does the average user have 2.5 hours worth of personal emails to attend to per day?
- epicide 8y agoBecause everybody needs breaks and it is way more acceptable to say you are "checking email" than "staring at clouds". Even if they won't admit it, I'm sure some people open their inbox and stare blankly as a subconscious way of taking a break. Plus, some people do generally have answering email as their job.
- keithpeter 8y agoIs it possible that people take 'doing email' as including facebook and other social media - messaging in any form? Lets face it we tend to do those things through Web interfaces on desktop/laptops or in messaging style apps on phones that tend to look quite similar in layout. And we need to be clear about the time frame as other posters have mentioned (per day or per week) On the work based figures, I suspect that people include the time spent on a task generated by the email as 'doing email'. My colleagues certainly would, and a lot of the work related email we get is providing information directly into a rich format email.
- epicide 8y ago> time spent on a task generated by the email as 'doing email'. This probably accounts for a large chunk of the reported hours, as well.
- maxxxxx 8y agoyou are "checking email" than "staring at clouds"." I lost my window seat a while ago and that's one thing I really miss. I used to look out the window and think. Now I often obsessively check Email or Hacker News.
- kaffeemitsahne 8y agoMaybe because they're the type of person that fills out e-mail surveys.
- DanCarvajal 8y agoI certainly don't think this is the case for the average user, but I knew about three people who this is absolutely the case for.
- phyller 8y agoThe stat is from slide 8 of https://www.slideshare.net/adobe/2018-adobe-consumer-email-survey https://www.slideshare.net/adobe/2018-adobe-consumer-email-s... and is clearly ridiculous. The only way the math works is if the 10% of people that are spending over 6 hours per day checking personal email, and over six hours per day checking work email, are averaging really high numbers. Which makes it likely they are filling in their weekly hours, not daily hours. There is simply no way I would believe 21% of "white-collar workers with a smart phone" are checking either their work or their personal email for more than 6 hours each and every day, let alone the 10 hours a day that would be required to offset the about 50% of people who reported checking less than an hour each day.
- BeetleB 8y agoThe slide doesn't say 5.6 hours - only Cal Newport is jumping to it. The slide is saying 3.1 for work and 2.5 for home - but not necessarily by the same people - so adding them doesn't make sense. >Which makes it likely they are filling in their weekly hours, not daily hours. I disagree. If I look at any one column, it's not hard to make the numbers work out. For example, assume each category is hitting the upper bound (40% are doing 1 hour, 22% are doing 2, etc) - and put 9 hours for the last 10% - you'll get 3.1 hours. Now that is a bit implausible (I took upper bounds of every category). But going with the other interpretation - only spending < 1 hour per week for the largest group - highly unlikely. In our workplace, a lot of work, sadly, is done through email - 2 hours/day just responding to emails is probably average.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoFrom the comments on the article: > I took a look at the numbers. The categories are broad. If I check my emails 10 minutes per weekday it is counted as one hour for the purpose of calculating the mean. 62% of the participants report checking work emails in 2 hours or less. IMO there is still enough time to do deep work. Fore average calculation, the last category “more than 6 hours” is assigned “9 hours”. So I think these numbers are skewed. > I don’t get why anyone would check their personal emails for more than two hours a day. The survey doesn’t say they did so during working time. So, yeah, it seems like this was deliberately distorted to the point that there's no truth left in it.
- occamschainsaw 8y agoThis is a ridiculously high number. Could it include other communication apps like Slack and Skype? Even then it seems a bit high. Or does it include sites such as http://pcottle.github.io/MSOutlookit/ http://pcottle.github.io/MSOutlookit/ ?
- Aaargh20318 8y agoHow many people actually check their email ? I get a notification if a new email arrives, there is no need to 'check' anything.
- eugeniub 8y agoPersonally I check email 5.6 hours per day, Slack 6 hours, Instagram 3 hours, HN 4 hours, Reddit 4.5 hours, Twitter 6 hours, and I still manage to work 14 hours per day.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoRight. I had to get up in t'morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down t'mill, and pay t'mill owner for permission to come to work. (apologies to Python and the 4 Yorkshiremen) :)
- dsr_ 8y agoIn 1997 or thereabouts, it became clear to me that I would always have email waiting to be read. Therefore: 1. I set up an independent account that only gets wake-me-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night alerts. 2. I started automatically filtering all email into different folders. 3. I stopped all email alert indicators except for the wake-me-up account. Ever since then, I check email when I get to a natural break in other activities. This happens seven or eight times a day, usually, so I'm never particularly far behind.
- LinuxBender 8y agoProud future troglodyte here. It would appear I am not average. I check work email twice a day at most unless someone says there is a meeting invite I need to accept. I don't accept meeting invites unless I know what the meeting is about and that I am really required to attend. Most of my emails are filtered and all external emails default to the spam folder. I check personal email a few times per week at most unless I signed up for something that sends a confirmation email. I run my own mail servers and use strings+more to read email and the S25R regex methodology of blocking connections from generic devices. I am sick of Slack and try to avoid looking at it and the dozen other places my coworkers chat or share docs.
- paulie_a 8y agoI barely check my email more than once a week, I get so many it has become useless. If it is important someone will call or come over to my desk and ask if I got the email. Same goes for voicemail, I rarely listen to them. For three years I just deleted all of them from my boss. It never caused any issues.
- bachir44 8y agoYes the survey is really poorly done, the only people who are susebtible to spend a lot of time sending and checking emails are the people who work, not everyone. The survey needs to be redone and more accurate. ____________________________________________________ https://downloader.vip/minecraft-pocket-edition/ https://downloader.vip/minecraft-pocket-edition/ https://downloader.vip/google-play-services/ https://downloader.vip/google-play-services/ https://downloader.vip/counter-strike/ https://downloader.vip/counter-strike/