Email Overload: Is work email wasting office worker's time and costing corporate money?

Sept. 16, 2009 - PRLog -- Knowledge workers struggling with their email at work can find out whether they are the only ones by taking part in the Inbox Alliance research study. The purpose of the Work Email Survey to define the real problems that office workers face every day with their email at work.

Anecdotally it is apparent that dealing with email is a productivity problem for knowledge workers. Research currently available appears to focus on Spam as being a key source of email overload. The Inbox Alliance believes that Spam is not the main driver of email overload, rather email from co-workers is the driving force behind time spent on email spiralling out of control.

According to Alistair Gordon, Director of Research at the Inbox Alliance, "The typical knowledge worker spends 2 to 3 hours of their working day dealing with email. Consider for most knowledge workers this is 26% of their working day*.

This would be no problem if all that time was spent productively. But we all know, because we are all email workers, that as much as a third of email time is wasted dealing with email that is either badly headlined, badly written, poorly structured, unfathomable, or just plain unnecessary.

We are not talking about Spam, which accounts for only 13% of an average office worker’s Inbox.** No, most of the unproductive email comes from within your own organisation," said Gordon.

The Work Email Survey takes respondents 10 minutes to complete. For completing the survey respondents receive ‘8 Email tips to save email time and stop common email mistakes’, which saves the typical office worker at least 12 email minutes a day. Respondents also receive a summary of the results allowing them to benchmark their email usage against the global knowledge worker population.  Just go to http://www.workemailsurvey.com for more information.

Notes to editor:
* Calculations are based on results collected so far of the Inbox Alliance Email Work Email Survey and the typical knowledge worker spending six and a half hours at work.
** Based on results collected so far of the Inbox Alliance Work Email Survey.

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About Inbox Alliance:
The Inbox Alliance was established in 2009 to help email workers manage email more productively. The Inbox Alliance believes that the solution to the work email problem is to involve other people – in conducting research and sharing ideas. To take part in the Work Email Survey go to http://www.workemailsurvey.com or visit the Inbox Alliance website http://www.inboxalliance.com