This week we passed a big milestone: 15 million minutes saved by our users.

An incredible amount of time is wasted in our inboxes over the course of a day. If you keep up with our blog you’ll know that an average employee spends 13 hours a week reading and responding to email, which is a whopping 28% of our work time. The question is how much of this time could be saved by implementing the right email tools and strategies?

The answer: A WHOLE LOT!

Constant interruptions kill productivity

Our ability as humans to concentrate is severely impacted by constant interruptions. Focusing on any task, no matter the complexity is difficult while constantly being interrupted by emails. A case study conducted by the Danwood Group (here) found it takes 1.5 minutes on average to read and recover from an email. The Danwood Group case study provides a very insightful example of this dilemma and it is as follows:

Lets say an employee is alerted every 5 minutes when they receive new mail, which means there’s potential for 96 interruptions in a regular 8-hour workday. If it takes 1.5 minutes to read and recover from an email this leaves 3.5 minutes until the employee is interrupted again. Now lets say this same employee changes the alert to go off every 45 minutes instead of 5, this means interruptions decrease to 11 per day. If 9 emails accumulated over 45 minutes it will take 6 minutes on average to read and recover from the interruption, which leaves 39 minutes until the next interruption.

Sanebox to the rescue

This shows how decreasing the frequency of email related interruptions can save you a significant amount of time. The bottom line is the longer you’re able to concentrate the more productive you can be through out the day. Every one of us desires to increase our personal productivity and that of our employees, if we have them. That’s why the we built Sanebox to help save you time by cutting down on distractions.

How it works

SaneBox moves unimportant, non-urgent emails out of your inbox and into your SaneLater folder, where they can be processed in bulk at a later time. Based on a number of studies on this subject, we conservatively estimate that we save 30 seconds for every email we move out of the Inbox. Sanebox will also send you summaries of your unimportant emails including the sender and subject line at specified times, so you can quickly review and process these messages in one fell swoop.

Further Reading

1. Danwood Case Study: Evaluating the Effect of Email Interruptions within the Workplace
2. Oklahoma City University Research: An Explanatory Analysis of Email Processing Strategies
3. Mchigan State University Study: Timecourse of recovery from task interruption: data and a model