Addicted

By some accounts, the average professional spends as many as 13 hours checking e-mail each week — almost twice the time time we spend reading. Or relaxing. Or socializing, even.

I think I fall into that category. In fact I may spend even more time than that!

It was only a few days ago, I confessed to my husband that over the past few weeks, I have become addicted to my smart phone. I am not playing candy crush or minecraft, I am organizing things, checking flights, texting friends, ordering a book on amazon and clearly reading and replying to work emails. As far as I can see being relatively efficient and productive. Yet................I can't put the thing down for more than an hour.

I read recently about a two-week experiment, where the researchers found that checking e-mail less at work makes people feel less stressed … and that feeling less-stressed correlates with a whole lot of other good things, including productivity, sleep quality — even the feeling that life has meaning.

To come to these conclusions, the researchers put together a pretty simple experiment. For one week, they asked a group of 124 e-mail-users to keep their inboxes open the whole workday and check them as often as they could. Then, for the second week, they told their subjects to keep their inboxes closed, turn off e-mail notifications on their phones, and only check e-mail three times during their work hours. During both weeks, the researchers sent participants daily questionnaires about things like how much work they got done, how they slept, and how stressed or nervous they felt.

Overwhelmingly, people answered the same way: When they checked their e-mail all the time, they felt stressed. And when they only checked it three times a day, their stress levels decreased.

Mmmmmm do I feel a new years resolution in the making?

Check email less. Put the phone down for multiple hours at a time.

Am I really addicted or just a heavy user?

Am I just productive and exaggerating the impact?

Anyone else in this quandry?