If it sometimes feels like you are a professional e-mail writer, you are not alone. People are increasingly going to the office and spending a big chunk of their day reading, writing and responding to electronic missives. On average, business users spend 19 per cent of every work day using e-mail, the latest statistics show. If you work an eight-hour day, in other words, you'll be spending more than 1? hours of it on e-mail. Or just under 100 minutes. Given that many people work much longer days in Hong Kong, you could easily be spending more than two hours as an office e-mailer.
E-mail has transformed working life, in many ways positively. But it has also had negative effects.
The most obvious detriment is spam. Flyers for cheap drugs, vitally important missives from lawyers in Nigeria with their hands on missing millions, and digital billboards promising easy ways to increase the size of your personal - errrm - endowment are the digital trash littering up the electronic world.
But it seems we are learning to handle spam, or at least learning to live with it. According to The Radicati Group, only about 18 per cent of the messages that e-mail users receive are trash. Although overall spam use is rising, it seems that spam filters and anti-spam tactics are keeping up pretty well.
According to Radicati, which tracks mobile communications and e-mail, people sent a total of 196 billion messages per day last year. That is expected to grow to 374 billion messages per day by 2011.
The researchers note that people have become increasingly keen to get their e-mails on the run, with wireless e-mail expected to grow from a US$6 billion market in 2007 to almost US$25 billion by 2011. They expect the 25 million wireless e-mail accounts to grow to 395 million accounts in just four years.