Email intensity, productivity and control in the knowledge worker's performance on the desktop

Experiencing stress, disturbing interruptions, loss of ability to concentrate, hurry and challenges to meet tight deadlines at work are very common in working life. At the same time, while variety of digital communication channels like instant messaging, video calls and social networking sites are getting more popular in working life, email is still intensively utilized work communication media. The goal of the empirical field study analyzing daily desktop computing of knowledge workers was to analyze association between email intensity in work time spending and subjectively experienced quality of work performance. It was found that while intensive email use does not impair subjectively experienced productivity, it may harm ability to concentrate, may increase forgetfulness and inability to solve problems at work effectively. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.