In case you didn't already know, email is stressing you out.
According to Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine who's been studying how email makes us feel, people check their email 77 times per day on average.
And all that email has a negative effect on their mood, according to Mark's studies.
"The more email people do, the lower is their assessed productivity," Mark said in the first episode of "Codebreaker," the new podcast from Marketplace and Tech Insider.
Another revelation of Mark's is that "reading email is correlated with stress, but not the actual typing of emails." Reading emails usually means you're processing tasks you have to do, while typing them out means you're completing tasks and getting things done.
It's that kind of frustration that's spurring innovation in communication in the workplace. Microsoft recently relaunched its Outlook email app on mobile devices. It has a feature that can bubble important messages to the top of your inbox and filter out messages it thinks you don't need to see right away.
And the startup Slack is trying to eliminate intraoffice email altogether with its app that allows you to chat in real time with colleagues.
That's not all Mark had to share about how we use email though. Check out more great insights in the first episode of "Codebreaker," which you can listen to here or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Here's a preview:
