Americans squander a shocking amount of time on work email outside of work

How often do you check your email outside of work? If the answer is anything but ‘never,’ then it’s probably taking up a lot more of your time than you realize.

According to a survey from Samanage, a SaaS enterprise service management company, 35% of U.S. adults spend at least one hour checking their email outside of work every day.

“The report indicates that employees have a hard time putting down their mobile device and stepping away from work email after hours,” Cord Silverstein, acting vice president of marketing for Samanage said. “Unfortunately, we don’t see this changing.’

Read more: Top 25 best jobs for work-life balance

Americans are having a hard time disconnecting

It’s no secret that Americans are attached to their devices pretty much all the time, but the ‘Email Overload Survey‘ of 1,500 U.S. adults found that people are even checking their work email instead of sleeping or eating.

Here are a few of the key stats revealed by the survey:

• 19% of people receive more than 100 emails every day.
• 19% of people wake up to check work email ‘very often.’
• 24% of people check email ‘very often’ during dinner.
• 40% of millennials do both.
• 25.6% of people said they keep connected to stay organized while roughly the same amount of people (24.2%) said they needed to stay connected.

Read more: Top 20 best work-from-home jobs for 2016

So how much time are we really spending on work email outside of work? All that time adds up to more than 30 days of extra work per year — triple the number of vacation days the average U.S. worker gets each year.

“However, the good news is that there are solutions available to businesses that will help employees organize and control the communication happening after hours,” Silverstein said. “We know that unplugging after hours may not be realistic for most businesses or employees, but incorporating automation technology or chat tools to streamline communication, not only has the potential to increase workplace productivity, but the opportunity to give employees time back in their personal lives.”

So if you can’t disconnect completely, try to balance the time you spend outside of work. Maybe give yourself a set amount of time or a cut-off time, when you shut down the devices and enjoy some time to yourself or with the family!