What Percent of Your Time Do You Spend on Business Emails? [Poll]

Email productivity will always be an issue it seems.

It’s a concept you can’t seem to master entirely and a part of your daily business life that seems to be — amazingly — continue to grow as time passes.

Email started as one of the internet’s great productivity tools. And today — especially in business — email productivity is more important than ever.

Email keeps us in contact with our growing list of contacts. It keeps us in touch with our customers and helps us boost our sales and increase our brand exposure.

Concerns Over Email Productivity

But is it taking up too much of our daily work schedule? How can we get in the habit of setting just enough time aside for emails on a daily basis and still be able to function like a normal, very busy, pulled-in-many-directions small business owner?

So we want to know …

What Percent of Your Time Do You Spend Daily on Business Emails?

Estimate the percentage of your day that’s either dedicated to or consumed by email inbox maintenance. This includes replies, incoming messages, invitations by email and general inbox management.

We’re giving you a few response to choose from this week:

5 Percent or Less

Either you don’t get a lot of emails or you’re a marvel of time management. In a 10-hour day (Surely, most small business owners would love to log just that much time!) that’s about a half-hour. Incredible! Share with us how you do it below in the Comments section.

10 Percent

OK. This isn’t bad. You’re probably getting a lot of emails and in the average day, you spend about an hour dedicated to just emails. Or maybe it’s not a dedication as much as it is the time it takes to send and reply to what you get coming to your inbox.

20 Percent

At this point, you’re probably someone who knows they’re going to be spending a good chunk of their days — this is about 2 hours’ worth — writing emails or working on the company’s next newsletter or product catalog or promotional blitz that’s sent to subscribers.

25 Percent or More

Here, we may have problems. Email may be taking up too much time in your day and taking you away from other tasks that are critical to running your small business. Spending close to 3 hours or more on emails means you’re either:

• Taking in too many messages (you may be offering your ear to too many people and it’s time to delegate some responsibility),
• Spending too long replying when, often, a simple response would do,
• Or you’re the owner of one disorganized inbox. Finding things in your email just melts the clock.

Likely, it’s all or most of the above. Tell us in the Comments how it’s come to this.

And how you”re handling it …

Way Too Much

Your email is out of control and you have no idea how much time you’re spending but you know it’s too much. You can’t get anything done. And even with all the time you spend in email, it seems to be more and more a futile effort. People who answer this way are most likely to have an unread email count in the double- or maybe even triple-digits.

Take a sec to answer the question and we’ll be monitoring the results over the coming days.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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This article, "What Percent of Your Time Do You Spend on Business Emails? [Poll]" was first published on Small Business Trends