Walk away from the email

Adrian Ott on the Fast Company blog reports on some research from People-on the Go about the amount of time executives are spending checking their email inboxes, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.  According to Ott, "Employees estimate that they spend spend about 4 hours a day (half a workday) managing multiple "inboxes.""  and "More than two-thirds (63.8%) of top management, and almost three-quarters of marketing (73.9%) and sales (74.2%) respondents check LinkedIn regularly".  I find these numbers a little high.  I know email is a constant distraction from getting things done but I find it hard to believe that many people are spending 4 hours a day in their inboxes.  Some research I recently did amongst small businesses in the UK indicated that LinkedIn is a popular tool for finding sales prospects and useful contacts but I don't get the impression it is used as much as the People-on the Go research claims. Perhaps it comes down to their definition of "regularly".  I regularly clean the car - every summer before we go on holiday.  Anyway, those points aside the research does look interesting and the chart below does ring true.

The rise of social media

Interesting findings from some Nielsen research about how Americans spend their time online.  Nearly 3 times as much time is spent on social networks as on email - a huge jump from a year ago.  I would like to see this data compared the volume of emails sent as my inbox seems to be as busy as it was last year.  I guess we are just paying less attention to what comes in which can only be bad news for the spammers.