Email etiquette: What your response time reveals about your personality

It's usually considered polite when a friend or colleague replies to your email promptly.

But such a swift response may have a downside - it may mean the sender is stressed or has low self-esteem, according to research.

Dr Karen Renaud, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, who carried out the study, said email users come in three categories - relaxed, driven, or stressed.

Women, in particular, felt more pressure to respond quickly to a new email than men, she said.

'The relaxed group don't let email exert any pressure on their lives,' Dr Renaud, an expert in computer science, said.

'They treat it exactly the way that one would treat the mail: "I'll fetch it, I'll deal with it in my own time, but I'm not going to let it upset me".

'The second group felt "driven" to keep on top of email, but also felt that they could cope with it. The third group, however, reacted negatively to the pressure of email.

'That causes stress and stress causes all sorts of health problems.'

Dr Renaud, psychologist Judith Ramsay of Paisley University and her colleague Mario Hair, a statistician, surveyed 177 people, mainly academics and those involved in creative jobs, to see how they dealt with emails received at work.

They found that 34 per cent of workers, who fell into the 'stressed' category, felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of emails they received each day and obliged to respond quickly to meet the expectation of the sender.

A further 28 per cent were 'driven' email users because they saw them as a source of pressure, while around 38 per cent were 'relaxed' email users because they felt comfortable not replying until a day or even a week later.

The research revealed that employees working on a computer typically switched applications to view their emails as many as 30 or 40 times an hour, for anything from a few seconds to a minute.

While half the participants said they checked more than once an hour and 35 per cent said they did so every 15 minutes, monitoring software fitted to their machines for the experiment showed it was more often.

On average people waited only one minute and 44 seconds before acting upon a new email notification, however two thirds of alerts got a reaction within six seconds, or faster than letting the phone ring three times.

Dr Renaud added: 'Email is the thing that now causes us the most problems in our working lives. It's an amazing tool, but it's got out of hand. Email harries you. You want to know what's in there, especially if it's from a family member or friends, or your boss, so you break off what you are doing to read the email.

'The problem is that when you go back to what you were doing, you've lost your chain of thought and, of course, you are less productive. People's brains get tired from breaking off from something every few minutes to check emails. The more distracted you are by distractions, including email, then you are going to be more tired and less productive.'

Dr Renaud said that the research also revealed that people who were 'driven' or 'stressed' email users were more likely to have lower self-esteem than those who felt relaxed about responding to emails.

'We do not know yet what trips people from being driven to respond to their emails to becoming stressed out about them,' she added.

'That is something we will need to do more research on.

'It was really surprising that so many people were negative about their email and the fact that the stressed group were predominantly female was also worrying.'

Another study, carried out last year, revealed that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email. This means that people who check their email every five minutes waste a whole working day - or 8.5 hours a week - figuring out what they were doing moments before.

Workers in creative occupations or jobs involving periods of concentration focusing on getting an important project finished - such as academics, writers, architects and journalists - were likely to be worst affected, while those in call centres for whom constant emails were integral to their work would not have the same problem.