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Email - the root of your work stress?
What to do when overwhelmed by the deluge...

By Steve Ranger

Published: Monday 13 August 2007

A deluge of emails constantly interrupting work is stressing out modern employees, who become tired, frustrated and unproductive as they attempt to keep up with the barrage of messages.

One in three workers feels stressed by the number of emails they get and the obligation to respond - although a chilled-out 38 per cent said they do not reply to email until a day or even a week after receiving it.

The research, carried out by Dr Karen Renaud from the University of Glasgow's Computing Science department, psychologist Judith Ramsay of Paisley University and statistician Mario Hair, quizzed 177 people to see how they deal with emails received at work.

It found that employees working on a computer typically switch applications to view their emails as many as 30 or 40 times per hour, for anything from a few seconds to a minute.

While half of the participants said they check their email more than once per hour, and 35 per cent said they check every 15 minutes, monitoring software installed on their machines for the experiment showed they check email more often.

Dr Renaud said in a statement: "Email is the thing that now causes us the most problems in our working lives. It's an amazing tool but it's got out of hand. Email harries you."

She added: "The more distracted you are by distractions, including email, then you are going to be more tired and less productive."

The research said email senders at work should never press other employees, especially those they supervise, to respond to their emails as they would to a phone call. Recipients should not constantly monitor their emails since this will negatively affect all other work activities, and should instead set aside dedicated email reading time to catch up on what's landed in their inbox.