10 Astonishing Email Habits
The world's biggest study into our email habits reveals some strange behaviors we might want to consider breaking.
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The world's largest study on email was conducted by Yahoo Labs recently, and it revealed startling facts about how we use email. Examining more than 2 million users and 16 billion emails over several months, the Yahoo Labs researchers have given us the best picture we've ever had of the way we work and the way we communicate with email.
Yahoo email has more than 300 million different accounts. Many of those accounts are not run by humans or are not currently being used. To ensure that only human interaction was studied -- rather than bots or automated email -- the study focused on what the researchers called dyads, pairs of people who exchanged multiple emails in "reciprocal interactions."
Basically, they narrowed the scope of the study down to people who were using email to have a conversation. For privacy reasons, they also only studied accounts which had opted into this type of research. That left researchers with roughly 2 million users, who sent about 187 million messages to each other out of a total subset of the 16 billion they received or sent from Yahoo accounts or commercial accounts. Yes, 16 billion. Due to Yahoo policy, the researchers could not track personal emails from other email services. Their study also excluded social media notifications.
Even with all those exclusions, you can see the researchers had a giant source of data to draw upon. Though, admittedly, it meant that their sources were prone to certain biased behavior. They were more likely to interact, for example, with those with whom they have already corresponded than they would be with the entire subset of all of their email. Still, it makes sense to watch these types of relationships more than those between corporate or social media accounts, which are often one-way affairs.
The study gives us fairly amazing insight into how we use email, how often we respond, the size of our email interactions, and what causes threads to end or to go on. Fankly, some of it is hard to believe. Check out the most astonishing findings of the Yahoo Labs email study and tell us whether or not they line up with your own email habits.
The most frequently occurring reply time is two minutes. Two. Minutes. How are people doing that? Even if I hear the ding of a new email, it takes me longer than two minutes to find my phone or open a browser and read the darn thing. Are people really just sitting with their email open 24/7, poised to zing out replies to whatever comes in? What do these people do if they want to get up and boil an egg or something?
That's right, 47 minutes is the median email response time. According to the study, this is also about the median time for a retweet. I don't know about you, but I'd guess I don't even read most of my email in 47 minutes.
That's the most common length of an email reply. Five words? How is this possible? Every email I send includes "thank you" or "have a great day." Most of them include "thanks for your last email." This makes me think the most common email in the world is something like "Got it. Thanks. Love, Mom." Why are we treating email like a text? Don't we have texts for short messages? That is what SMS stands for.
The median reply is 47 words. This paragraph is exactly 47 words long. Does that seem like enough for the average email? Are you amazed I could write exactly 47 words? The thing I worry about in this study is that it doesn't include enough business email.
In the middle of a thread, reply speeds usually quicken. In long chains, involving 10 or more replies, responses enter a pattern where they pick up speed after the first few replies. It makes sense. People want to resolve something, or they are excited to talk. However, the end of a thread is very predictable because suddenly one person takes longer to reply, usually twice as slow as the established pattern. That slower reply time is the social signal that the thread is done.
Millennials (aged 21-35) replied to each email message at a median of 16 minutes, while older adults took 24 minutes and folks over 50 needed a full 47 minutes. Clearly, email skill is the advantage younger folks have over you at work.
The older you are, the longer email messages you write. The average email length for teens is 17 words, compared with 21 words for millennials, 31 words for older adults, and 40 words for those over 51. We'll let you argue over why that is.
There are a lot of other findings in the study that makes sense but are a little less surprising. For instance, email messages sent by phone tend to be shorter (20 words median) than those by desktop (60 words median). Email by phone also had a shorter reply time. Email with attachments naturally had longer reply times. Overall, the study shows a form of communication that isn't close to dying, despite many predictions of its demise. What do you think? Do these email habits resemble yours? What do they say about the way we communicate and work? Tell us all about it in the comments section below.
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