Fact · Dictation for work and study
4.08hours per week
A 2007 book chapter reports that 97 percent of workers use email multiple times a week, for a daily average of 49 minutes, citing a 2001 Gartner survey and two other sources.
Quote found word for word on the live source, last checked October 19, 2026
In the source's own words
“97% of workers report using email multiple times per week for a daily average of 49 minutes”
Everything through Email, Steve Whittaker et al., University of Washington Press, in Personal Information Management (eds. William Jones and Jaime Teevan), 2007, Section 10.1, Introduction and Description of Topic.
Open the original (DOI 10.1515/9780295800684-010)- What it measures
- The chapter's introduction gives this as a usage figure from marketing surveys, citing Gartner 2001, Levitt 2000 and Pitney Bowes 2000. The chapter does not describe their samples or methods. The figure measures time using email, not time spent writing or typing.
- What it does not show
- A figure from 2001, quoted secondhand. The source does not say whether the 3 percent of workers who do not use email are in the average. The row converts the 49 minutes a day to a week at five workdays: 49 times 5 is 245 minutes, which is 4.08 hours.
In the data
A row of How Much Time People Spend Writing and Typing at Work, as Whittaker et al. 2007, workers: 4.1 hours per week.
- Activity
- Who
- Workers who use email multiple times a week
- How measured
- Self-reported survey
- Year
- 2001
- Note
- 49 minutes a day at five workdays is 245 minutes, which is 4.08 hours a week (4.083 exactly). The five-day week is the conversion's assumption.
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.