Re:Re:Fw:Re: Workers Spend 650 Hours a Year On Email

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/07/re-re-fw-re-workers-spend-650-hours-a-year-on-email/260447/

Unless you happen to get some sort of obsessive compulsive satisfaction from keeping your inbox in shipshape -- and hey, if you do, more power to ya -- dealing with email has got to be one of the most deadening aspects of any office job. And if the tedium of Outlook management wasn't already dreadful enough, consider this: There's a good chance you spend more than a quarter of each week reading and answering those emails.

That factlet comes courtesy of the McKinsey Global Institute, which broke down how so-called "interaction workers" spend their days. They describe these as people whose jobs require "complex interactions with other people, independent judgment, and access to information." I'm interpreting it as consultant speak for "office stiff."

The upshot: we spend 13 hours a week, or 28 percent of our office time, on email. Assuming two weeks vacation, that multiplies out to 650 hours a year.

[IDemo]

1. Email is only a fraction of the amount of time I spend on Excel

Talk about "deadening".

[unblock]

2. i spend easily more than 50% of my time on email -- but that's a good thing

same goes for our ceo.

much of my job involves addressing questions and concerns from internal and external constituents. some i research and answer myself, others i route to the appropriate co-worker, other i set up a conference call to address.

many of the questions involve a legal draft or a spreadsheet or a data file or some programming code, so sending me the question by email with an attachment is much more useful than calling me.


i get easily at least 300 emails a day, although some of them are just for reference (including a few computer-generated) and i don't really read them.

[lunatica]

3. I spend much more time on emails since my work comes through them

as attachments. My unit does travel and general reimbursements for 65 research departments at UC Berkeley. They send all the paperwork as attachments in emails. Virtually all communication and information gathering is done via email.

The emails are sent to a list and we all get all of them and when we respond to emails we are supposed to cc the list also. I get over 1,000 emails a month.

[rucky]

4. This breaks down pretty accurately with my work in "content creation"

[ThomThom]

5. I don't understand the point here ... is there an implication that it time wasting?

We now communicate through e-mail for business. We use to talk on the phone and before that we wrote letters. I would more like to know how much time employees are spending on totaling non-work things like face book and twitter. Now that is a real time-waster in the office. People now text and communicate and get information off their phones so things change. Soon e-mail will be old school.