Checking email less frequently reduces stress

Using email is one of the most common online activities in the world today. Yet, very little experimental research has examined the effect of email on well-being. Utilizing a within-subjects design, we investigated how the frequency of checking email affects well-being over a period of two weeks. During one week, 124 adults were randomly assigned to limit checking their email to three times a day; during the other week, participants could check their email an unlimited number of times per day. We found that during the limited email use week, participants experienced significantly lower daily stress than during the unlimited email use week. Lower stress, in turn, predicted higher well-being on a diverse range of well-being outcomes. These findings highlight the benefits of checking email less frequently for reducing psychological stress. Every day, 183 billion emails are sent and received worldwide (Radicati & Levenstein, 2013). Email is among the most widespread online activities—in a 2011 survey, 92% of US adults reported using email to communicate (Pew Research Center, 2011). In addition to this ubiquity of email, people's inboxes play a central role in their lives: More than one-third of US adults surveyed in 2014 said that email would be 'very hard' to give up—more than three times as many people who said the same about social media (Pew Research Center, 2014). And, according to one survey, about one-third of US workers report replying within 15 min of receiving a work email, and three-fourths reply within an hour (Kelleher, 2013). The popular press is rife with claims about the effects on well-being of this ubiquity of email in the life of today's information worker. Best sellers, such as the Four Hour Work Week (Ferriss, 2007), recommend a variety of approaches to reducing stress at work by, for example, checking email only twice a day. In stark contrast to this abundance of causal claims in the popular discourse, very little experimental research has explored how different approaches to dealing with email actually impact well-being. Accordingly, in the present research, we set out to conduct the first experimental field study to investigate whether the frequency with which people check email exerts a causal impact on their well-being. Correlational research has provided preliminary evidence that dealing with email may be associated with negative outcomes for well-being (for a review, see Taylor, Fieldman, & Altman, 2008). This correlational research indicates that people who handle more …