We’re Still Addicted to Email, but Things are Getting Better (Slowly)

It appears that we may finally be finding some balance with our greatest frenemy: email.

Consumers are still spending 5.4 hours each weekday checking email and it’s still their preferred communication channel at work, according to Adobe Campaign’s third annual consumer email survey,  but there has been a 28% decrease in consumers checking email messages from bed in the morning and more than a quarter of consumers now wait until they get to the office to peek at their inboxes.

One in five consumers never check email outside of normal work hours, Adobe’s report finds, and nearly half don’t check while they’re on vacation.

“In today’s high-speed, anxious world, this sounds like a positive evolution in our relationship to email,” says Kristin Naragon, director of email solutions for Adobe. “The overall number of hours consumers spend on email each day decreased 27 percent from last year—with declines across both personal and work accounts.”

Time spent checking work emails dropped 20% year-over-year, down to 3.3 hours, while personal email sank 36%—possibly due to the rise of increasingly capable messaging platforms like Slack and Messenger—to a comparatively modest 2.1 hours.