Most of us are total­ly hooked on e‑mail. We couldn’t imag­ine life with­out it. If my Out­look isn’t flash­ing a pre­view of my lat­est e‑mail, my iPhone is buzzing.

I came across a real­ly inter­est­ing arti­cle on e‑mail titled, “E‑mail’s Dark Side: 10 Psy­chol­o­gy Stud­ies.” Some inter­est­ing find­ings include:

You check more than you think. Accord­ing to this study, par­tic­i­pants claim to check their e‑mails, on aver­age, once an hour. “How­ev­er, when the researchers spied on them, it turned out they checked their e‑mail every five min­utes.” I don’t know that I’m check­ing it that fre­quent­ly but it’s cer­tain­ly more than once an hour.

E‑mail eats a quar­ter of the work­ing day. Researchers found that “this is because peo­ple are not just using e‑mail to com­mu­ni­cate, they are also using it as a way of track­ing tasks.” I guess I fall in that camp: Every day I cre­ate a task list for myself in Out­look and check it through­out the day to mon­i­tor if I’m on track.

It takes 64 sec­onds to recov­er from an e‑mail. Par­tic­i­pants took about a minute to recov­er their train of thought after an interruption.

Low rap­port when using e‑mail. My boss com­plains that no one uses the phone any­more. She has a point. Researchers found that “even a sin­gle tele­phone call can cre­ate enough good feel­ing between the par­ties to bridge the rap­port gap.”

Here’s one of my pet peeves—delivering sen­si­tive news by e‑mail. Occa­sion­al­ly, a col­league decides to deliv­er unpleas­ant news that could be upset­ting using e‑mail. To make mat­ters worse, they “cc” a bunch of peo­ple on the e‑mail. Is it too much to ask to deliv­er the infor­ma­tion in per­son in a some­what sen­si­tive way? On a relat­ed note, one of the stud­ies notes that “peo­ple tend to be more neg­a­tive in e‑mail.”

Check out the study (exter­nal link).