9 facts about the way we use email

Email. It is the office worker’s Sisyphean task, an endless stream of interactions (or distractions) that, by some reckoning, gobbles up 2.6 hours a day – or 27 days a year.

While platforms like Slack have emerged to offer alternatives to the groaning inbox, email overload is still a major drain on productivity. But how do different people cope with their deluge of messages? And what can you do to make email work better for you? A study by academics at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering sheds some light.

By analysing 16 billion emails sent by 2 million people over the course of several months, the researchers gained the following insights:

1. If someone is going to reply to you, they’ll reply quickly. More than 90% of replies happen within a day of the message being received, the most likely reply time is just two minutes, and half of replies arrive within 47 minutes.
2. The longer the reply, the longer it takes to write, obviously – but only up to a point. Emails that are longer than 200 words actually take less time to write, almost as if they were being spewed out in a spontaneous fit of keyboard-thumping rage. I think we’ve all received an email like that. Researchers also note that copy and pasting could skew the picture here.
3. Short emails are the norm. Don’t worry if your co-workers are curt: emails with only five words are the most common, more than half the replies are fewer than 43 words long, and only 30% are longer than 100 words.
4. If you want a proper reply, send your email in the morning. Unsurprisingly, people write longer replies in the morning, when they are likely to have a mug of coffee in front of them and fewer distractions. Another shocker: people write shorter replies at night and during the weekend.
5. Young people are faster on email. The median reply time for teenagers is 13 minutes, for young adults (20-35 years old) it’s 16 minutes, for adults (36-50 years old) it’s 24 minutes and for mature users (51 and older) it’s 47 minutes.
6. The older you are, the longer your emails tend to be. While teenagers’ median reply length is just 17 words, mature users send messages of a more considered 40 words.
7. Younger people cope better with email overload. Younger users reply to a consistent fraction of emails and simply write shorter messages as the inbox swells, while older users tend to become overwhelmed and reply to fewer emails.
8. Replies sent from mobiles are fastest, followed by tablets, followed by desktop.
9. Men write slightly quicker, slightly shorter emails. Men send on average (by median) 28-word replies within 24 minutes, while women spend 28 minutes composing 30 words.

Have you read?
How to manage email conflict
Why you should stop using these words in emails
Why writing by hand helps you learn

Author: Ceri Radford is a commissioning editor at the World Economic Forum

Image: French model Marine Deleeuw reads her emails in Paris. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer