Business Review

Executive Summary

The average professional spends 4.1 hours per day responding to work messages. But psychologically, it carries a disproportionate weight: regardless of how much time we actually spend, it feels like we are always answering email, and always stressed about the unanswered messages waiting in our inboxes. Keeping track of every email you receive over a two-week period might reveal some interesting insights into why. For example: every time we say “yes” to a request, it begets even more emails. If you agree to be a guest on someone’s podcast, they’ll follow up with additional emails requesting your bio, your headshot, a pre-interview call, and so on. It’s easier to say “no” to the less-deserving requests once you realize how many you get; seeing that you get, say, 10 requests per day makes it easier to justify saying no to 9 of them. Finally, conducting an email audit might show you what a small proportion of the messages you get are actually important. If only 10% of your received messages matter, maybe it’s not quite as stressful to think about.

Andrew Nguyen/HBR Staff/The New York Public Library

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with the crush of email. In fact, one study showed the average professional spends 4.1 hours per day responding to work messages. During a recent time tracking exercise, I discovered I’m actually at the low end of the spectrum, spending about 1.35 hours per day on email. But psychologically, it carried a disproportionate weight: regardless of how much time I spent, it seemed like I was always stressed about the unanswered messages in my inbox.

To better understand why email had become so burdensome, I undertook an experiment. For two weeks, I tracked, recorded, and categorized every email I received, splitting them into categories like “messages from my assistant” and “client communication” and “networking or event invitation.”

I’ve already worked hard to optimize my inbox, including using a free service called Unroll.me to unsubscribe from many e-newsletters and bundle the ones I do receive into one daily message, so I didn’t count those. But everything that made it directly into my inbox was tallied — 1161 messages over a two-week period. Here are three important lessons I learned from the process, which may be valuable as you think about how to make the time you spend on email more efficient, as well.

Each “yes” leads to more work. Saying no is a challenge for any professional: you don’t want to disappoint people, and any given opportunity may lead to positive outcomes. But analyzing the emails I received taught me an important lesson about why it’s essential to exercise stringent judgment: each “yes” leads to a cascade of (typically unforeseen) work. Over the two-week period, I received 64 messages related to media interviews, podcasts, and webinars I had agreed to. A small number of these were the initial invitation — far more were reminder notes, requests for headshots or images of my latest book, and sometimes links to elaborate forms (one had 24 questions!) to fill out in advance of the interview.

I had also agreed to help with promoting the online course launches of two colleagues during that time period, and received an astonishing 46 emails from them with links to sample email copy, “leaderboards” tracking who made the most referrals, and more. Agreeing to a podcast interview is never just an hour, and agreeing to promote a colleague is never just one email. Recognizing the downstream consequences and impact on one’s time is essential when evaluating your decision.

It’s easier to say “no” when you realize how many people are asking. It was stunning to me how many messages I received — a full 12% of my overall emails — were people asking me to do things. In some cases, it was easy to say no. I received 34 pitches from strangers asking to contribute to my blog, write about their boss or client, or try out their new app. There were another 26 invitations from strangers or near-strangers to attend events or “set up a call about ways to collaborate.” But many requests were harder to navigate, including 75 messages from colleagues asking for favors, whether it was a book endorsement, an introduction to someone, or a request to connect me to a contact of theirs. Three people even asked me for money for various charitable causes.

In total, I received 69 requests per week, or nearly 10 per day. It takes extreme willpower to say no, but it became easier when taking the aggregate numbers into account. As the old saying goes, “Your inbox is someone else’s to-do list for you.” When I thought about how much energy I’d be spending doing 69 people’s bidding per week, it helped me refocus and recognize that I could only make an impact if I focused on my own priorities.

Focus on the few emails that are actually high priority. What counts as an important email? I’ll suggest that the truly essential ones are client communication and inquiries about potential new engagements. Using that metric, only 10.5% of the messages I received over the two-week period qualified.

The answer, then, is to avoid getting lost in the endless stream and instead to focus on the small percentage of messages that matter most, from clients and potential clients. Even in the darkest days of email overwhelm, if you force yourself to put a “star” on high priority messages, you can often successfully tackle that handful.

Despite the rise of technologies like Slack, for the foreseeable future, email will always be with us – and indeed, some predict the number of messages we receive will continue to grow at a compounded annual rate of 15%. Spending more time fielding messages – time away from our own priorities – isn’t a sustainable answer. And asking people to take you off of mailing lists or leave you off of “reply all” threads is a losing battle. (Just save your time and don’t respond.)

Instead, by understanding the signal to noise ratio of our inboxes, and recognizing how easy it is for others to make (often onerous) requests for our time, we can make smarter choices about where to focus our attention.