In a study last year, Dr. Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email, so people who check their email every five minutes waste 8.5 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before, reports Suw Charman-Anderson, a writer for the Sydney Morning Herald.
Dr. Jackson found that people tend to respond to email as it arrives, taking an average of only one minute and 44 seconds to act upon a new email notification. About 70 percent of alerts got a reaction within six seconds, arguably a faster reaction that occurs when a phone rings, sings or buzzes.
Likewise, a July 2006 study by ClearContext found that 56 percent of users spent more than two hours a day in their inbox.
The other thing is that what people say, and what they do, often are different. And that seems to be true about the frequency of interaction with email systems. About 64 percent of respondents in the Jackson study claimed to check their email once an hour while 35 percent said they checked every 15 minutes, but they were actually checking it much more frequently, about every five minutes, in fact. So it is likely that respondents underestimate the amount of disruption email causes.
Add Twitter posts, instant messaging, text messaging and other forms of IP-mediated communications, and things will get worse. "Presence" might help, but only possibly. Unified communications providers need to pay more attention to "overload," not "missing a message."
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