Why are you busy with your email?

This is something that bothered us at unbox.email for SUCH a long time. Email exists for decades, i think around 1979, and i wonder if it solves what we want it to solve. At start it was a beautiful medium.

The cost of email

Email also brought us an easier way to communicate with each other, which was great at the start. In 2025 4.6 billion people use email, and according to CloudHQ.net the average office worker gets 121 emails every day. And spends 15.5 hours a week on email. We are talking 450 billions of euro's every year

The psychological cost of email

Working 15.5 hours on email is not consistently after each other, we are talking notifications, distractions, people telling "Did you read that email", badly written emails. You are context switching every time a beep comes in, take a moment to think about the missing productivity hours you could have had.

Email equals Interruption

At Unbox Email we wonder how many emails of those 121 are NOT read, ignored or just plain deleted. In our case we discovered, it's A LOT. We believe email is a great medium to simply connect to each other, but NOT in the form it is right now. With overloads of commercials, confirmations, calendar invites, summaries, document archive, or just plain noise. The real work is not answering email, it's asking yourself if email deserves your attention at all.

According to CloudHQ.net 93% of professionals check email every day, meaning you are switching in and out of context each time you check it. What a waste.

Most emails don't need action

The question that remains, out of all your email that you check, how much of them require an action. And even if it requires an action, does it require action RIGHT NOW. For some people maybe, but for most, definitely NOT.

In our case we saw that 32% of all email could be discarded, 24% did need action but not right now, and the rest was there for knowledge transfer ( Summaries, Product updates, document sharing, etc).

Email is not broken

The way we use email is. It's everything, tasks, project updates, archives, confirmations, noise. But do we ever question ourselves if it is worth our time? Or do we accept it, because, that is just the way it is?

We believe we need to do better, It is time to rethink how we spend time on email and how we allow it to interrupts us.