Your Coworkers Are Your Biggest Distraction At Work, Survey Says

Your coworkers are driving you to distraction. So is sifting through a ton of unnecessary email making sure you didn't miss something important, according to a survey of 2,000 folks by Jive Software.

On average, U.S. workers spend 16 percent of their workday checking irrelevant email, the study finds.That's a little over an hour a day for an 8-hour day. And some people have it much worse. 18 percent said that they spend a quarter of their workday, about two hours, checking useless emails.

Jive calculates that these emails are costing the American economy $2 billion per day in lost productivity.

When people weren't reading email from colleagues, they were yapping with them. Some 36 percent said coworkers are their biggest distraction at work, a bigger distraction even than unwanted email.

Jive has a vested interested in this kind of study. It sells collaboration software, an alternative way for coworkers to interact besides email and meetings.

Sill, we have to agree that email is out of control these days.