Always in search of information I recently asked people in, primarily through Twitter, about the time they spend on different communication channels. While you can see the high-level results above I want to point a few things out first:
- Since the bulk of the respondents were reached on Twitter I suspect that the hours on Twitter number is skewed and does not accurately reflect non-Twitter users.
- I received 119 responses from across the globe. Since a few users reported as much as 177 hours on these channels a week I decided to not count data where total hours exceeded 80. While 80 sounds high, and is, it is not uncommon when you consider the time spent in and out of the workplace in these different channels.
- If you would like the full survey results you can download them from the blog's Facebook fan page. Note that the Excel sheet has all survey results in tab A and Tab B and C are just two slices of the data, one by region, one by job title.
While I did not find the results surprising, here were my main take aways:
- On average people are spending almost 13 hours a week communicating in email, about 6 hours a week on the phone, 9 hours a week on Twitter, and just over 4.5 hours a week on Facebook.
- The C-level Executive spends the most amount of time of anyone on the phone (8.4 hours a week) and the least amount of time in e-mail (10.7 hours a week) of any of the groups. They are also spending the least amount of time on Twitter (7.7 hours a week).
- Instant Messaging and SMS are lightly used in comparison to the other channels we asked about with the C-level using these technologies the least.
- Asia leads the way in terms of SMS usage with 4.25 hours a week.
- With the exception of one Australian who was e-mail heavy, North Americans lead the way in terms of e-mail usage.
If you pull down the full data let me know what you learn.