
The Average User Checks Email 5.6 Hours Per Weekday - puuush
http://calnewport.com/blog/2018/10/09/the-average-user-checks-email-5-6-hours-per-weekday-this-is-not-good/
======
jerf
That'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".)

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phyller
The stat is from slide 8 of [https://www.slideshare.net/adobe/2018-adobe-
consumer-email-s...](https://www.slideshare.net/adobe/2018-adobe-consumer-
email-survey) 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
The 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.

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PhasmaFelis
From 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.

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xboxnolifes
Work aside, how does _the average user_ have 2.5 hours worth of personal
emails to attend to _per day_?

~~~
epicide
Because 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
Is 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
> 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.

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codingdave
Whether 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
Very 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.

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dsr_
In 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.

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occamschainsaw
This 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/)
?

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thrower123
If 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
That'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
You must be blessed enough not to have to do any support or field questions
from customers...

~~~
WilliamEdward
How 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?

~~~
BeetleB
Tech 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.

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vijaybritto
What?! No. I saw it like 15 mins barely. It's all slack now.

~~~
Sharlin
Though 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
slack 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
Yeah, that's how it should be. But I'm sure for many it's not.

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kaffeemitsahne
Isn'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
No, unless your job is _specifically_ about communicating with people via
email. Which definitely isn't a programmer's job, for example.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
Unless 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
> I still think about it sometimes.

Picture it... Sicily, 1922.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
It's in Sepia tones and everything.

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paulie_a
I 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.

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LinuxBender
Proud 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.

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ngrilly
5.6 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
It 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.

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DanCarvajal
I 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.

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eugeniub
Personally 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
Right. 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) :)

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Aaargh20318
How many people actually check their email ? I get a notification if a new
email arrives, there is no need to 'check' anything.

