Survey: 19 Percent of Americans Check Email in Bed
You’ve heard of breakfast in bed, right?
Well, now there’s a much more modern phenomenon happening on mattresses across the United States: Email in bed.
A new survey commissioned by Xobni, a provider of contact management products, indicates 19 percent of American workers check job-related email outside regular business hours before getting out of bed in the morning or after getting into bed at night.
This e-mattress trend is more prevalent among American men, with 21 percent of guys saying they read and send emails in bed, compared with 16 percent of women.
Checking work email in bed also is more common among younger adults, the survey shows. Thirty-one percent of American adults ages 18 to 34 acknowledge doing so, as opposed to 15 percent of those 35 to 54.
Of course, this logic from a researcher at Intel Corp. lends some reasoning to why work email has invaded the bedroom:
“The most comfortable spot in the world is in bed, and that’s where people start their day and end their day,” Ken Anderson, an anthropologist and a senior researcher at Intel Research in Beaverton, Ore., told the New York Times in 2006.
Other results of the Xobni survey give some insight into why nearly one-fifth of Americans are e-mattress geeks.
The survey indicates 27 percent of Americans who check email outside business hours do so because they feel they’re expected to provide quick responses, even when they’re technically off the clock.
Furthermore, 37 percent of Americans are afraid to go without checking their work email. Forty-three percent of Americans who check email during off-hours say they do it to ease their workload, while 18 percent think they’ve got to do it to achieve career success.
Overall, the survey shows, nearly two-thirds of Americans check work email away from the 9-to-5 grind.
The online survey was conducted for Xobni by Harris Interactive.
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