You Spend More Than 5 Hours Each Week Checking Your Email (fortune.com) 72
In a survey of more than 1,000 "white-collar workers" across the U.S., people reported checking their email an average of 2.5 hours each weekday. The average person checks work email more than three hours each day, according to Adobe, which conducted the survey. From a report: According to the report, email is most popular among people between the ages of 25 and 34 -- today's Millennial generation, roughly. That group spends an average of 6.4 hours in their Inboxes each day, compared to 5.8 hours for those between the ages of 18 and 24. For the first time in the three years Adobe has conducted the survey, email isn't the sole most desirable way to communicate with colleagues. Instead, face-to-face conversations are tied with it as the top communication method at work. When it's time for tough conversations, though -- like quitting a job -- face-to-face conversations have lost some ground. Just 52% of those between the ages of 25 and 34 say they would use a face-to-face conversation to quit a job. That number jumps to 77% among those over the age of 35.
Itâ(TM)s called a job (Score:2, Funny)
Perhaps youâ(TM)ve heard the term?
I don't spend 5 hours checking email (Score:5, Informative)
And most people don't either. Maybe 5 hours writing and responding to emails, but that's because they're jobs involve delegation, decision making, answering questions, etc. Like, I would say I spent 30 minutes "responding to an email" today, because I had to go do research to answer it correctly.
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I prefer it over IM, as that it leaves more of a "paper trail" than I find that IM can do as readily.....and this comes in handy for CYA in a BIG way.
But I can deal with it more asynchronously than with IM which is very disturbing and breaks concentration.
I often either don't turn IM on or turn if off when I actually need to do work, and only turn it on for actual meetings with white boards or screen sharing that is required.
But emai
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I prefer it over IM, as that it leaves more of a "paper trail" than I find that IM can do as readily.....and this comes in handy for CYA in a BIG way.
This, and only this, is why email is preferred over every other communication method.
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Well now I don't know what to believe. It says right there in the condescending headline that YOU spend more than 5 hours checking emails.
Wait, is that you meaning you or you meaning me?
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I think I spent about 4 hours yesterday, just "checking" my first email.
But here's another thing... I thought "millenials" are people born in 2000/2001. How did they get to be 34 years old??
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No... (Score:1)
...I don't.
My inbox is where correspondence goes to die!
5 hours to check mail? (Score:2)
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we use the microsoft outhouse at work but my email doesn't take that much time. rules sort the spew I *might* or *wont* need to look at into folders. only important sender's stuff remains.
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You need to swing back in and check out Office 365! The cloud based Outlook is amazingly even slower and more laggy than regular outlook. And it freezes up for me when displaying other people's calendars and then flashes them on and off again a few times before stabilizing.
If you thought regular Outlook was bad, Microsoft has a huge surprise in store for you with the Office 365 version!
Work! (Score:1)
The checking is rarely what takes 6 hours a day, I don't know about Adobe but my email client tells me if there is new stuff. The work that follows is what takes time, but this has nothing to do with email, it's just that email is how I learn about work that needs to get done and finish much of it the same way, by writing and sending a reply.
And seriously?
email is most popular among people between the ages of 25 and 34 -- today's Millennial generation, roughly. That group spends an average of 6.4 hours in their Inboxes each day, compared to 5.8 hours for those between the ages of 18 and 24
You know, maybe that's not because it's "popular" because between 25 and 34 people are more likely to work than people between 18 and 24.
Not Me (Score:1)
No I don't (Score:2)
I check email a couple of times each day. It's another distraction that I can do without.
Let you in on a secret (Score:2, Insightful)
If you do not send emails, you will get less of them.
Also: only send an email that you do not care will be made public during discovery, deposition, and trial. That will make you think twice before sending.
A key to success... (Score:5, Interesting)
The higher level/pay a person gets, likely the more time they DO spend in that style of communications.
A factory floor guy probably spends 0 work hours using email, except perhaps on their own phone during downtime.
A low level floor manager might spend 2 hours a week.
A middle manager might spend 7 hours a week on emails.
An upper manager might spend 15 or more on emails, and the rest largely on meetings largely reiterating the messages in the emails.
A solo contractor might spend 20 hours, since they're playing all those roles and can't skimp on the communication part between all their projects. And a portion of that time they can't really bill for, which is part of the whole price equation for their time.
As long as people work for people, they'll need to keep in touch.
Ryan Fenton
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In that case, success sucks
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If I spent 20 hours a day posting on slashdot, that would suck too.
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Cisco wanted people to use its Spark [ciscospark.com] instead of e-mails for online communications.
No I don't. (Score:3)
Check my emails twice a day private and at work - which is 3*5 hours per week -whenever a mail comes in, which, in my case, is roughly 3 times a day. I write an absolute maximum of 10 (ten) emails per week, mostly it's one or two. My *entire* email communication is easily done with 60 minutes per week.
How people can even maintain their sanity with 200+ emails per day is beyond me. My strong suspicion is that most of that is totally superfluous bullshit anyway. An the occasional glimpse I get from full-quote mail threads written by the unwashed masses appears to confirm that suspicion.
My 2 cents.
Only at work (Score:2)
I'm not just checking email (Score:2)
Popular? (Score:2)
"According to the report, email is most popular among people between the ages of 25 and 34 "
I guess the young Whippersnappers get their 399 Amazon notices via Whatsapp then.
No I don't (Score:3)
There's nothing more condescending - and in this case, completeley wrong - than a headline that tells you what YOU do.
Some of us aren't so vacuous as to be unable to be interested in anything unless it directly affects ourselves personally.
If I processed (read and replied when needed) ... (Score:2)
I would probably be at about 10 hours a day. Hell, last week, on Thursday I logged off my corp email at 7:30 PM, and when I logged in at 7:30 on Friday I had a hair over 300 new emails in my inbox (of course, something blew up overnight, that was about 2X normal).
If I fully read each email, and responded to the ones I had a dog in the hunt on, I would easily go above 40 hours a week. Fortunately, I can ignore whole swaths, and trust my lieutenants to do the triage for me.
Really? (Score:2)
You Spend More Than 5 Hours Each Week Checking Your Email
Really? I regularly get chewed out by all kinds of people for not spending more than 5 hours each week checking my damn email. I only intermittently check, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and the rest of that garbage. Facebook gets a check about once every three months. The only way to make sure I get a message is to call me and failing that to track me down and tell me in person. Thankfully my boss usually prefers to do that.
The Information Age called... (Score:2)
... and said "No shit, that's what electronic mail is for."
Having RTFA, it seems to be about Slack, et al. trying to make a dent in email's ubiquity, which I just can't see happening. In my own experience, I have (at present) one client contact who insists upon using Hangouts rather than email, and while I like the guy a lot and appreciate the hell out of the business, it's a massive pain in the ass. In those sorts of tools it takes an inordinately long time to find things that we discussed more than a shor
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Yes, I read my e-mails (Score:2)
Not me (Score:2)
Before I retired? Depends on what "dealing with email means". Does that count a 10 minute walk to another building to discuss something? Or just a quick "WTF? Come see me."?
I'd still rather read email (Score:2)
than sit in a fucking meeting that could have been one.
Jobs are play acting (Score:2)
We had to make them simple so that everyone could participate. No class divisions here, no sirree!
Now, every job is basically going through the motions that make it look like work, and then doing something fairly inconsequential...
Even professionals are pretty much guided by software, professional publications, conventions, etc.
The brain is disconnected, and we can just go through life pretending that upsidedownworld is somehow acceptable, when we know in our guts that Rome 2.0 is falling fast...
Rules? (Score:1)
More than 5 hours a week? (Score:1)
That's plainly wrong! I spend more than 5 hours on *Monday* checking my email :-)
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