Benefits Think

Unconscious email use is the biggest threat to workplace productivity

By Krista Krumina April 18, 2023, 9:00 a.m. EDT 4 Min Read

It's impossible to imagine our work life without email. It connects people across the globe with a few clicks. It helps us avoid unnecessary calls and meetings. Besides, checking email is just the perfect way to procrastinate.

Back in 2012, McKinsey estimated that Americans spent 28% of their workweek checking and responding to emails. Over a decade later, this discovery is still widely used to illustrate how counterproductive email is and why we should limit its use at work.

Now, a fresh study from DeskTime claims it's not all that bad — in 2022, Americans, on average, spent just 27.23 minutes per workday in their inboxes, which amounts to 8.62% of the workweek. This data was collected from over 10.5K U.S. knowledge workers using the app, which automatically tracks its user time.

Does this mean that the dominance of email at work is over?

Unlikely. There are other, more recent studies still confirming McKinsey's discovery — people spend as much as 2.5 hours a day, both within and after working hours, tackling work emails. But what the new data highlights are the discrepancy between the actual and perceived time we spend on emails.

Time spent on emails vs. time email spends in your mind
We might be spending just under half an hour in our inboxes reading incoming messages and composing replies, but the time our mind spends processing received information and recovering from distraction is much longer. Hence, the contradiction in the data.

The "inbox time" also includes all those times we quickly check our emails for new incoming messages. We can do it dozens of times during the day, yet the total time we've spent with the inbox open remains relatively short. Whereas the mental time spent on emails — overwhelming.

Every time we check our email, we distract ourselves from the task at hand. After each distraction, we need time to regain our focus and get back to the deep work zone — some studies suggest this may take up to 25 minutes.

As a result, email spends much more time in our minds than we actually spend using it. This explains we feel like email takes so much time out of our workday — some surveys report 2.5 hours of the workday, others, as many as 5.

It's not email – it's our constant checking
We check our emails all the time, often without even being fully aware of it.

Statista found that 42% of Americans check their email several times throughout the day — some as many as 10+ times a day. If, after each time, we need at least a couple of minutes to refocus our attention, then it's no surprise that we perceive it as time-consuming and overwhelming.

But why do we feel the urge to check our inboxes every few minutes? It might be the same reason why we're so drawn to open our social media apps countless times during the day: we're chasing dopamine.

Social media triggers the reward system in our brain to release dopamine, the so-called feel-good chemical. With every notification, we receive the attention and validation that we were after. In the chase for this rewarding feeling, we feel an overwhelming urge to regularly check our social media accounts.

At work, we engage in the same dopamine-chasing activity when checking our inboxes. Every new email signals to our brain that we're valued and our input — whether opinion, expertise, or attention — matters. And we want to feel that way more often. Hence, the constant checking.

Toward more conscious work
What can we do about our complicated relationship with email? Ditching it is probably not an option. Then what is?

One tactic used by many highly effective people, from Bill Gates to Elon Musk, is time blocking. It requires you to consciously plan the time to spend on emails. For some, it might be the first hour in the morning; for others, 15-minute sessions twice a day. "Pause inbox" tools might be useful to keep you disciplined.

By limiting the times you check your inbox, you will not only reduce the time your mind spends on emails but also make its use more conscious and, therefore, more productive. Additional bonus? You might end up with less workload in general — by the time you'll get to your inbox, some issues will already be solved, and some questions will be answered without your help.

Experts suggest that the first hours of keeping off your inbox will be the hardest, filled with anxiety and the FOMO feeling. It's the same when you give up social media. But with time, we'll experience the feeling of liberation and learn to establish healthier, more conscious relationships with our digital companions — email and social media alike.

Krista Krumina

Co-founder , Truesix