I'll be there for you: Quantifying attentiveness towards mobile messaging

Abstract

Social norm has it that people are expected to respond to mobile phone messages quickly. We investigate how attentive people really are and how timely they actually check and triage new messages throughout the day. By collecting more than 55,000 messages from 42 mobile phone users over the course of two weeks, we were able to predict people's attentiveness through their mobile phone usage with close to 80% accuracy. We found that people were attentive to messages 12.1 hours a day, i.e. 84.8 hours per week, and provide statistical evidence how very short people's inattentiveness lasts: in 75% of the cases mobile phone users return to their attentive state within 5 minutes. In this paper, we p..