Science Report | Biology News, Economics News, Computer Science News, Mathematics News, Physics News, Psychology News
Dr Shock MD PhD
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.
E-mail is an inexpensive, efficient and fast way of communication. It can enhance communication between departments and communication across continents. Nevertheless a lot of posts and especially blogs write about email overload: Lifehacker.com, Email Overloaded, Harvard Business School.
They advice you to check your email at certain time points in the day, usually twice a day somewhere around 11 a.m and 4 pm. The scientific background for this solution to these loathsome distractions is based on Reducing the Effect of Email Interruptions on Employees. In this research 15 people of the Danwood company in the UK were monitored over 28 working days by software on their computer: WinVNC. This allows viewing of a remote computer desktop environment, the users could not tell whether they would be watched. The server side had a video recorder attached to record the activities of the employee.
It took the employees an average of 1 minute 44 seconds to react to a new email notification by opening up the email application. The majority of emails, 70%, were reacted to within 6 seconds of them arriving and 85% were reacted to within 2 minutes of arriving. The time it takes the employees to recover from an email interrupt, and to return to their work at the same work rate at which they left it, was found to be on average 64 seconds.
Email is just one of many interruptions during work, others being telephone calls, buzzers and personal …