That's just ridiculous, to a programmer. I don't remember when I have last received something critical by email, never mind hours worth of it. They're all either automated notifications or company-level announcements; neither requires immediate action, or often any action at all.

You must be blessed enough not to have to do any support or field questions from customers...

How is that the job of a programmer and not tech support? And how is this being done by so many people that the average of 5.6 hours makes sense?

Tech support? What's that?

Most software is written for internal company use. In my last job, the software we wrote was used by hundreds of users in my company. No way is the company going to hire tech support people for internal software.

We were very aggressive in ensuring we don't get support questions all the time. We made some of the customers our tech support. Every "domain" of our software had experts amongst our users. So if any user had a question about performing X with our libraries, they were to contact the customer who was an expert in doing X. If he couldn't help, then that expert would contact us. Direct questions to us from new users were just replied to with "Check with the experts first".

This helped a lot in cutting down requests. But most companies/orgs, in my experience, will not be supportive of that type of tech support. We had to be very aggressive in it, and we had the backing of our and the users' department heads.

At my company, there is an list where problems that can't be handled by tech support or customer facing people get raised. Cases where the documentation is unclear or absent, things that can't be obviously classified as bugs, etc. Making a habit of answering those is a great way to learn about the system you're working on.

That said, I don't spend hours on it.

I spend more time clicking "select all like, delete all" than actually reading them.

How is it possible that even in the worst cases you spend more than 5 hours doing this? Every single day? Most emails require a quick, pre-determined response (which google actually makes easier for you now) and the ones that don't are surely not taking more than 5 minutes to type out.

What do you mean Google makes answering emails easier?

It's not really that much easier, but their new AI let's you type certain common responses like "Thank you, I'll look at this" in an instant. They made a presentation about this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogfYd705cRs

ah yes. I found those just add a lot of cognitive load to no benefit. By the time I've read "thanks!", "Yes", "How about tomorrow?" I could have just typed a response. Maybe it's just me but I basically never replay to an email with such terse responses as the options provided in Gmail.