Fact · Dictation for work and study
8.8hours per week
Microsoft's 2023 Work Trend Index found that the heaviest email users, the top 25 percent of its commercial Microsoft 365 users, spend 8.8 hours a week on email.
Quote found word for word on the live source, last checked October 19, 2026
In the source's own words
“The heaviest email users (top 25%) spend 8.8 hours a week on email”
Work Trend Index 2023: Will AI Fix Work?, Microsoft Work Lab, 2023, Introduction, paragraph on time spent (before 'Three findings').
Open the original- What it measures
- The figure is based on intentional email activity, reading and writing email, in Exchange Online by commercial customers over a rolling 28-day period ending in March 2023, excluding weekends. Heaviest users are the top 25 percent of users by duration. Excludes the education segment.
- What it does not show
- This describes the heaviest quarter of users, not the average worker, and the page states no average for email. It counts logged email activity, not self-reported time. The page gives no head count for this group.
In the data
A row of How Much Time People Spend Writing and Typing at Work, as Microsoft 2023, heaviest email users: 8.8 hours per week.
- Activity
- Who
- Heaviest 25% of commercial Microsoft 365 email users
- How measured
- Logged by software
- Year
- 2023
- Note
- The page gives 8.8 hours a week directly, so no conversion is needed. Basis is logged software use: the page's footnote describes intentional email activity counted in Microsoft 365. No head count is stated, so n is left out.
Source
Used to calculate
- In the time spent writing, typing and on email dataset, the 7 published figures for “Email” have a median of 8.8 hours per week, ranging from 0.2 to 15.
- 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.