I love a good email usage survey…

…and apparently a lot of other folks do, too.  ZDNet cites research that indicates that 65% of workers are spending 1 – 3 hours per day in email.  This jives with our findings earlier in the year.  The spin on the results is that the problem is the result of poorly written communication, with 40% of the respondents spending 1/2 to 3 hours/ day wasting time on poorly written email.  IMO this is a chicken and egg problem.  Are people spending too much time in email because the messages are poorly written, or are the messages poorly written because they get too much email to deal with effectively on a daily basis?

43Folders is running their own informal poll on how many actionable messages a user receives in a given day.  Here’s what we found in our survey: 56% of our respondents received between 15 and 100 emails/day, with 62% reporting that 50% or more of that email was work related.  See our graphs on email volumes for more detail.