Well, apparently.
The thing that gets me about this story — and I’ll freely admit I’ve been known to jab at the “send/recieve” button in my email client of choice (Thunderbird, if you really care) — is the following quote:
“On average, workers who receive an email take four minutes to read it and recover from the interruption before they can resume working productively, Ms Egan said.”
Four minutes? FOUR MINUTES!! I take about thirty seconds to read an email, tops. And that’s if it’s long, complex and directly related to what I’m working on right now. Heck, I’ve just spent the last half hour teaching four year olds to read, and the contents of their early readers — probably on par with most of the email I get — didn’t take them four minutes each to plough through. Or am I overestimating the intelligence of the average office worker?
I rather like the fact that there are 12-step programs to help people recover from email addiction. Can you imagine the scene: “Hello, I’m scareypants455@hotmail.com and I’m an email addict”…