view online at Mashable.com
E-mail has invaded every aspect of our lives. We don’t need a survey to tell us as much, but new research from Xobni and Harris Interactive confirms that we’re not alone in dealing with e-mail overload.
A total of 2,200 adults 18 and older in the U.S. and U.K were
surveyed on their e-mail habits and attitudes.
Most respondents - 72% in the U.S, 68% in the U.K. - indicated that they check e-mail during their time off. A large percentage of Americans also check e-mail in bed (19%), and while on vacation or during days off (50%).
When queried about their outside-the-workplace e-mail activities, nearly half (46%) of the American respondents indicated that they do so to ease their workload. Thirty-seven percent are afraid they’ll miss something important (guilty as charged), and
27% check work e-mail when off the job because it is expected of them. Another
26% keep up with e-mail while on vacation because they simply can’t handle the volume otherwise.
When comparing e-mail behaviors by gender, there are some subtle differences in habits. Men, for instance, are more likely to check e-mail in bed - 21% of men claim do so, while 16% of women admit to the practice. Of course, this bed-checking trend also skews toward 18- to 34-year-olds, who are twice as likely (31%) than 35- to 54-year-olds (15%) to do so.
The real-time nature of the web and social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook are likely contributing to our always-on attention spans, and hence, contributing to the e-mail overload problem. We can only hope tools such as
Rapportive,
Gmail Priority Inbox and
Xobni’s add-ons will help our cause.
Tools and Tips to Solve Email Overload
(from
New Survey From Xobni on Email Overload Shows There Is No Such Thing as a Day Off for Americans and Brits)
There are several resources and tricks available to people that will help them be more productive and efficient so they feel less compelled to do work outside of regular business hours, and ultimately feel less overwhelmed.
For example, email add-ins such as Xobni (
http://xobni.com) - "inbox" spelled backwards - can help people take back control of their inboxes whether after vacation, or simply to manage the daily inflow of emails to their inbox. Internal surveys show that the average Xobni user saves 45-60 minutes per week by using and searching with Xobni. Benefits of Xobni that helps overwhelmed workers includes:
• Lightning fast email and people search. Xobni automatically creates a profile for every contact in a user's inbox, helping them to quickly find information and emails exchanged, meetings scheduled, links or documents shared with business and personal contacts.
• Integration of relevant third party data, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Salesforce, in to your Outlook inbox eliminates the need to leave email to find information needed to be most effective.
Emails are threaded so you can see the complete conversation reading multiple emails related to the same topic.
To feel less stressed after returning from vacation, people can also do simple things before leaving such as:
• Sending calendar reminders to their closest contacts reminding them that you will be away
Include an alternate contact in the Out of Office (OOO) message to ensure those emailing get the assistance they need while you are out instead of requiring work from you upon returning from vacation.
• Set up different OOO messages for people inside your company verses external contacts
State in this message the date of your return so people with important matters know when they can reach you in the office.
• Quickly get caught up on the most important matters by doing a Xobni search on key colleagues (boss, direct reports) to see all communication, attachments, links, etc. shared with those people while you were out.