Fact · Dictation for work and study
2.6hours per week
In a 2005 time-motion study of 11 primary care physicians, reviewing, writing or dictating chart notes during visit-specific work outside the examination room took an average of 0.52 hours a day, which is 2.6 hours a week at five workdays.
Quote found word for word on the live source, last checked October 19, 2026
In the source's own words
“Time Use Categories and Activities Hours Mean (SD) Percent of Total Workday ... Chart (reviewing, writing, or dictating notes) 0.52 (0.62) 6.0”
Time Spent in Face-to-Face Patient Care and Work Outside the Examination Room, Andrew Gottschalk and Susan A. Flocke, The Annals of Family Medicine, 2005, Table 1: Visit-specific work outside the examination room.
Open the original (DOI 10.1370/afm.404)- What it measures
- Observers recorded each physician's time on 21 randomly selected patient care days, in minutes, by activity. The figure is the mean per day for work about the patient being seen, done outside the examination room.
- What it does not show
- The activity counts reviewing, writing and dictating notes together, so it is not writing alone. The source reports hours a day; the weekly figure assumes five workdays, which the source does not state.
In the data
A row of How Much Time People Spend Writing and Typing at Work, as Gottschalk et al. 2005, chart: 2.6 hours per week.
- Activity
- Other
- Who
- Primary care physicians, observed at work
- How measured
- Time diary
- People
- 11
- Note
- The source gives 0.52 hours a day. 0.52 times 5 workdays is 2.6 hours a week; the source states no weekly figure. The activity mixes reviewing with writing and dictating, so it is filed under Other.
Source
Used to calculate
- In the time spent writing, typing and on email dataset, the 2 published figures for “Other” have a median of 3 hours per week, ranging from 2.6 to 3.5.
- The time spent writing, typing and on email dataset holds 16 data points, each a published figure traced to its source.
- The time spent writing, typing and on email dataset draws on 9 distinct sources.