Most of us have a love-hate relationship with email. While it is a primary tool for communication and collaboration at work, the torrent of emails also drives us crazy! What is supposed to be a time-saving tool has become a source of distraction for many.

New research from Hiver, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, which surveyed 450 professionals in India, found that nearly half (48%) of respondents spend at least an hour a day checking emails. The findings of the survey further revealed that 16.2% of employees spend more than 4 hours on their inboxes.

Other key highlights include:

More than 61% of employees (between the ages of 25 and 32) dip into their inboxes every time a new alert pops up. This means they stop whatever else they’re doing to take a look.

Moreover, 55% of the respondents admit to acting on every email as soon as it comes in.

Almost a third (32.4%) of the respondents receive more than 50 emails in a day. Also, 50% of the respondents say that the maximum number of emails received are from their own organisations.

Perhaps most interesting was the finding that employees often feel quite productive just by having sanitized their email inbox, despite possibly not creating any value for the organisation.

The alarming statistic shows that emails consume a large share of our working hours. While many of the emails received are essential to our work, a significant amount is also a time-eating distraction that can deter productivity. Email taps into the strong urge of ‘feeling productive’ as well. For instance, when you started at eight in the morning, your inbox had 40 emails, and now you have cleared it up to 10 – progress!

As the speed of doing business increases, it is darn easy to get sucked into an obsessive email checking habit. Dozens of messages clutter in our inboxes every day, and we need to deal with these email interruptions by managing, classifying, and prioritizing efficiently. We must fend off the email allure during prime working hours and reclaim our productivity.

How many times in a day do you ‘push the lever’ to check your email messages?