The average knowledge worker checks his email eleven times per hour—eighty-eight times over the span of a day. It’s hard to get any real work done with so many interruptions. The same study found that employees spend an average of just around thirty-five minutes on email per day—which means that email consumes much more attention than it does actual time. Once you become aware of how often you check for new messages, you’ll likely want to reduce that amount of time because of the high cost of interruptions.
