F-05 · Where the Week Goes
How much of the work week do knowledge workers spend on email and chat?
Email alone takes 13 to 28 percent of the work week, depending on how it is measured. Microsoft's usage data adds Teams chat at 19 percent of measured time in its apps.
13–28% of the work week on email alone
- Medium confidence
- 5 primary sources
- 2012 to 2025
- Last checked
Every study on one scale
Shaded: 13–28% One figure A range in one study
Chart values as text
- Scale: % of the work week on email. Shaded range: 13–28%.
- Workfront (2019): 13–15%
- Microsoft (2023): 15% (of time in apps)
- Adobe (2019): 209 min a day (about 26%)
- Dillon et al. (Microsoft Research) (2025): 11.7 h (about 29% of 40 h)
- McKinsey Global Institute (2012): 28%
Why medium confidence: Five primary studies, but they split into two groups (about 13 to 15 percent and about 26 to 29 percent) because they use different denominators and definitions of email time.
Sources
| Study | Creator | Year | Sample | Method | Figure | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| State of Work 2020 | Workfront, survey by Regina Corso Consulting | 2019 | 3,750 employees at companies with 500 or more staff in the US, UK, Germany and the Netherlands | Online survey, July 2019; people split their week into categories adding up to 100% | Email takes 15% of the week (US, UK), 14% (Netherlands), 13% (Germany) “Best guess for what percentage of your work week is taken up by each” | business.adobe.com ↗ Archived copy ↗ Workfront is now part of Adobe and no longer hosts the report; the archived copy is the original PDF. |
| Will AI Fix Work? (2023 Work Trend Index) | Microsoft | 2023 | Microsoft 365 usage data from commercial customers, 28 days to March 2023 | App usage data, observed. Share of time inside Microsoft 365 apps, which is not the whole week. | Email 15%, Teams chat 19% and Teams meetings 23% of measured time “15% in email, forming 57% of the time spent communicating” | microsoft.com ↗ |
| Adobe Email Usage Study 2019 | Adobe | 2019 | About 1,000 office workers per country in the US, UK, Germany, France, Australia, India and Japan | Online survey, July to August 2019, self-reported minutes checking work email | 209 minutes per weekday on work email in the US (Germany 173, UK 207, France 216) “number of minutes you spend each weekday checking your email” | slideshare.net ↗ Archived copy ↗ Adobe's own results deck, hosted on SlideShare. Adobe's blog post on the study covers the US only. |
| Shifting Work Patterns with Generative AI (NBER Working Paper 33795) | Dillon, Jaffe, Immorlica and Stanton (Microsoft Research and Harvard Business School) | 2025 | 7,137 knowledge workers at 66 firms | Field experiment using Microsoft 365 usage data, 2023 to 2024; this is the baseline before the AI tool | 11.7 hours a week reading and responding to email “the average worker spent 11.7 hours per week reading and responding to emails” | arxiv.org ↗ |
| The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies | McKinsey Global Institute, using IDC survey data | 2012 | Managers and professionals in IDC's 2009 survey; sample size not stated | Modeled estimate from McKinsey and IDC data | 28% of work time reading, writing or answering email “This includes 28 percent of work time reading, writing, or responding to e-mail” | mckinsey.com ↗ Archived copy ↗ |
How much time goes to chat at work?
One source measures it. In Microsoft's 2023 usage data, Teams chat takes 19% of measured time in Microsoft 365 apps, against 15% for email and 23% for Teams meetings. Email and chat together are 34% of that measured time. The heaviest quarter of email users spend 8.8 hours a week on email.
Numbers you may have seen
These figures circulate widely. Here is what the original source says.
- Adobe: people spend 5 hours a day on email. That adds work email (209 minutes a weekday, US) to personal email (143 minutes). Work email alone is about 3.5 hours a day, self-reported.
- McKinsey: email takes 13 hours a week. The report gives 28 percent of work time. We could not find the 13-hour conversion in the report itself.
- Slack: 25% of workers spend too much time on email. This is an opinion on whether email takes too much time. It gives no hours.
More from Where the Week Goes
- F-0119–25%How much of the work week do knowledge workers spend searching for information?
- F-0253–61%How much of the work day goes to coordinating work rather than doing it?
- F-033–18 hHow many hours a week do people spend in meetings, and how much of it is wasted?
- F-0420–26 minHow long does it take to get back to a task after an interruption?
- F-063–4 hHow much time do people lose switching between apps at work?
- F-074.6–5.7 hHow much time do people spend redoing work that already exists?
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