The Average User Checks Email 5.6 Hours Per Weekday

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".)

The stat is from slide 8 of 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.

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.

Work aside, how does the average user have 2.5 hours worth of personal emails to attend to per day?

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.

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.

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/ ?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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