I check email all the time, but my current role doesn’t make that a chore and I do not expect the same of others - if I have something urgent for someone, I will speak to them by phone or face to face.
In my view the OP’s colleague who emailed a meeting request with 10 minutes’ notice was both rude for assuming people could drop everything and foolish for assuming the message would get through in time.
I work a fairly regular schedule as a cubicle-dwelling corporate drone, and while I telecommute often, I only check work email during my M-F workdays between about 8:00 and 6:00. I do not have work email forwarded to my phone, and never check on weekends unless we have a project implementing for some reason then. There is nothing I am involved with that required 24/7/365 coverage. In an emergency, people have my cell phone # and know how to reach me. I have a pretty clear line between work and the rest of my life.
I never check my work e-mail
I checked “every hour,” but that’s really an aspiration goal for me. The reality is that I have Outlook always open at work and it refreshes every five minutes and I always check the new emails that pop up. When I am on the go, I check my phone for emails whenever I have free time.
I am a lawyer who gets about 100 emails a day. I send out about 10-20 emails per day.
People expect me to see emails right away, too. Even my coworker, who will ask me, “Did you see that reponse from Kevin yet?” I go to look and it’s just a thank you email that arrived one minute before I clicked send/receive. Yeah, so important I gotta check immediately, huh! But usually it’s a client that’s calling about 10 seconds after they hit send on an email with an attachment, which will take 5 minutes to upload and then download anyway. So we’re sitting on the phone saying “did it arrive yet?” “nope, not yet…it usually takes a bit for attachments to come through…” to each other. For a non-critical email that has all the details I need. Which after arrival they proceed to read the email out loud to me as though this is brand new information. Then the pause. That’s it? That’s it. They called me to read an email to me that I am perfectly capable of reading myself. Thanks. You go into the work queue exactly where you deserve to be. You certainly didn’t speed up the process.
Anyway, back to the topic, which is, my emails arrive every 20 minutes and I wait to check between what I’m working on. Unless the current project needs a block of time more than 2 hours in one go, in which case I check emails as a sort of short break. I never check outside of work hours and nothing goes to my phone.
When I had a job that basically required e-mail (I’m semi-retired and in a shipping center now) I checked maybe once a day. Once e-mail became the common form of communication I was working in a smaller business where everyone was within the same space; important stuff was more a shout away. And customers questions often took time to reply to. It was easier to do it all at once and be done with it. Some customers expected instant replies - they either got used to my habits or they didn’t and my boss was fine with that.
We’re a busy office and email is our primary form of communication. I get about 1000 per day. I’m constantly checking my work email, both while at work and at home.
I have two work emails. One for the company I work for, which is a big-ass IT firm, and then another for the client site where I do my day-to-day work. Since I sit right at my work computer all day, and actual work gets done through email, I leave the client’s Outlook open. The email for my company, I check maybe once a week.
We (employees of big-ass IT firm) just got a mass emailing on the client addresses last week about how we need to be checking our company email at least once a day so we don’t miss important time-sensitive emails. I have been at this job for nearly a decade. The number of important time-sensitive emails I’ve gotten on the company address is exactly zero. However, I do have a limitless supply of emails from our various VPs on the subject of Pointless Bullshit, so as a core competency I’ll just keep leveraging my email synergies the one time per week.
I work in the legal field and am required to be responsive fairly quickly to important email. So Outlook is always running when I’m at work. And, unfortunately, I am expected (at least by some) to be responsive to email even when I’m not at work. So on a weekday, I’d say I’m on top of my work email between about 6am and 10pm, and I look at my phone pretty regularly on weekends.
Thankfully, most of my superiors are not the sort to abuse it (a lot of after-hours emails I get make a point of telling me not to worry about responding until I’m back in the office – people just want to send me the email while the subject is on their mind). And the person who was most inclined to contact me after hours is someone I work with quite a bit less these days.
Often; I’d say that depending on how engrossed I am in what I’m doing, I check my e-mail (or notice that something has come in) in no longer than 45min intervals, usually closer to 10. I won’t always stop to respond, however, unless I’m not in the middle of something.
In my last position our whole department (4 people) were on an e-mail alias, and when requests would come in, my boss would constantly ask if I had seen such-and-such an e-mail if I hadn’t replied all within a half hour of receiving it. And, another coworker who would take it upon herself to reply to e-mails that were generally my responsibility if she didn’t see a response in about that same time frame. Drove me bonkers.
Most of my emails are status reports of the dozens of processes I have running. I check frequently to see if anything broke and to delete stuff so I don’t get overwhelmed. Mostly the title is enough to let me know if I can delete it. But lots of my internal customers send mail also.
I check once at home just to delete the 50 or so which have accumulated. I mostly don’t respond to anything unless if it is from someone in India or Taiwan.
Exception - if I’m deep into coding I don’t check.
I check on my phone in meetings, but my alerts are turned off, otherwise it would be way annoying.
I check my work e-mail once a day - I’m only at the computer once a day, between 5:30-6:00 am, running an inventory report. The rest of the time I’m either in the backroom dealing with inventory and/or running a forklift, or out on the salesfloor.
MAYBE I check it twice a day - honestly, if I did so more often I’d probably get in trouble for neglecting my other duties.
Until 2 months ago I didn’t even have a work e-mail.
It does depend on the job, though - I’ve had other jobs where I checked it every 15-20 minutes.
I have a second monitor where email sits open all the time. I look at it as soon as I see out of the corner of my eye that I have new mail. (I do have Outlook rules that move a good amount into folders and mark as read, so anything that comes in is usually worth looking at.) I consider it part of my job to respond quickly (OK, sometimes too quickly) to departments and administrators, who essentially are my customers.
I always find it strange when people talk about email, meetings and Powerpoint taking time away from their “real work”. As a manager in a consulting firm, my “real work” basically consists of non-stop emails, meetings and creating PowerPoint decks to facilitate those meetings (after sending via email).
Heck, the other day I feel like I spent 2 hours with 5 people trying to craft an email to send to request a meeting later this week.
Yeah, I feel the same. Email is my work, it seems.
Another on the ‘Email is work’ bandwagon.
I have two screens. Outlook is on the left one all day. I do other things on the right.
Didn’t answer poll (no relevant answers).
My email program checks any and all email accounts as often as the profile for that account says to check. In most cases that’s every 15 minutes. Some of the work-related email is ‘background noise’ —the server reporting that it has executed Routine X on external textfile A resulting in N new records in Table J. That stuff is filed automatically without it beeping at me. Other work-related email is treated the same way new personal mail that survives my spam filters: I get a beep and that alerts me to check the email program. If I’m immersed in something or out of the room, I will examine the email program to see if there are unread messages in any of the frontmost mailbox windows as a matter of course, within the hour on a working day, within the next few hours on other days.
All. The. Fucking. Time.
I get 300-400 per day. I need to read about 100 of them, and respond to about 20 of them.
That’s in addition to the fucking instant messages.
It’s maddening.
I hardly even know I HAVE work email (which is perhaps an indication that I probably SHOULDN’T have it). Maybe once every few months. I’ve never found anything that pertained to me.
I check my home email every couple of weeks.
You needed an option for “When I think about it”.
Generally, I check it when I open up Outlook in the morning, then ignore it unless I am waiting for something.
I’ll glance at the incoming message notification if I happen to see it, but I don’t actively stare at my inbox all day.
Oh, and I only bother for the work day. My work email isn’t on my phone, or at home, or anywhere else.