The Average Person Spends This Many Hours A Week Drafting Emails

According to an international survey of 8,000 small business employees, the average employee spends 10 hours and 47 minutes a week drafting emails that few recipients read.

That’s about 112 emails a week, spending about five and a half minutes on each one.

Knowing that over five minutes of your time went into carefully drafting an email, only a third of those you send the emails to, actually read them…

This might explain why respondents said that when their email is responded to, it’s common to have their questions not be answered, to be addressed by the wrong name or to be asked a question they just answered.

Respondents are aware they’re guilty of not reading emails, too: over half (57%) admitted that if an email is “too long” — eight or more sentences — they won’t bother reading the whole thing.

Small business employees delete or otherwise don’t read, an email based solely on the subject line an average of eight times per day.

WHAT DO PEOPLE FIND CHALLENGING, WHEN USING EMAIL?

• Important emails can go to spam or junk — 53%
• My inbox is easily clogged by emails that aren’t relevant to me — 50%
• It’s easy to misconstrue tones — 47%
• There’s an expectation of staying “formal” — 45%
• I’m not able to remove myself from email chains — 29%
• I can’t find the right information because it’s buried in an email thread — 24%
• I haven’t been cc’d on emails or into threads with key information — 24%
• It takes too long to get a reply/response — 18%
• Different platforms make sending attachments difficult — 12%
• My inbox has become unmanageable — 12%