Adults Addicted to Email
The typical 9-5 work day no longer exists for most Americans. Whether it's the fear of missing important business or a strategy to be more productive, a new survey released by Harris Interactive reveals that two out of three American workers check their business email outside regular office hours.
With the sputtering economy and the popularity of mobile email on smartphones, workers are overwhelmed with email and feel compelled to work longer hours to keep up with their jobs, according to the survey.
Men are more likely than women to extend office hours: 65 percent of men check their email compared with just over half of the women surveyed.
The most popular reasons cited for checking email outside the office were easing the workload (45 percent), afraid of missing something important (37 percent), and achieving success (18 percent). Less than 5 percent said they do it to impress a boss or co-workers.
Between the sheets
Blame it on the smartphone. One in five Americans who check their work email, do it while in bed either first thing in the morning or last thing before they fall asleep at night. And, younger workers between the ages of 18 and 34 are twice as likely to begin or end their days with email as their older counterparts ages 35 to 54.
On holiday
Vacations are no excuse to ignore business email. Fully half of American professionals who check work email outside of regular business hours said they checked work email while on vacation/have time off. More than a quarter said they had too many emails to respond to while on vacation, and 18 percent reported having a hard time being productive after returning from a holiday.
Coping
Many email programs have built-in tools to help workers manage their communication more effectively. Gmail recently introduced Priority Inbox , a "smart" program that tracks the user's email activity to extract important email and place it at the top of the Gmail inbox.
To feel less stressed after returning from vacation, Terra Carmichael, head of communications at Xobni.com, a San Francisco-based firm that offers a free contact management plug-in for Microsoft Outlook and BlackBerry smartphones, recommends that people do the following before leaving on vacation:
- Send calendar reminders to your closest contacts reminding them that you will be away.
- Include an alternate contact in the Out of Office message to handle tasks while you're gone.
- Set up different Out of Office messages for people inside your company and external contacts. Include the date of your return.
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