The numbers add up fast
The average professional spends about 3.5 hours a day on work email alone, according to Adobe's 2019 Email Usage Study, a survey of more than 1,000 US office workers. That's nearly half of a standard eight-hour workday spent reading, writing, and responding to messages. It tracks with the McKinsey Global Institute's often-cited estimate that email eats up 28% of the average knowledge worker's week — roughly 11 hours.
It's not just you
Volume is a big part of the problem. The average office worker receives around 121 emails and sends about 40 every single day. Multiply that across a team, and inbox triage alone starts to look like a full-time job hiding inside everyone else's job.
The trend is (slowly) improving
There's a bit of good news: Adobe's multi-year tracking shows total daily email time, work and personal combined, dropped from nearly 8 hours in 2016 to under 6 hours by 2019, then leveled off. Better habits and better tools helped — but there's clearly a floor nobody's broken through yet.
What this means for you
If your team is losing hours a day to email, that's not a discipline problem — it's a workflow problem. The right automation, routing, and triage systems can hand a meaningful chunk of that time back. That's exactly the kind of thing Efficient Street builds.
Curious what that looks like for your business? Reach out at info@efficientstreet.com or use the contact form — we reply within one business day.