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How much of the office workday goes to email?
- 117 emails a day, an interruption every 2 minutes (Microsoft, 2025).
- On an ops desk, most emails are tasks to retype.
- Count 50 emails to find your number.
What the research says
- The average worker receives 117 emails a day, most skimmed in under a minute, plus 153 Teams messages per weekday.
- During core work hours, people are interrupted every 2 minutes by a meeting, email or chat. For the busiest fifth of workers that is 275 pings a day.
- 40% of people online at 6 am are already reviewing email, and by 10 pm 29% of active workers are back in their inboxes.
- 48% of employees say their work feels chaotic and fragmented.
- Source: Microsoft Work Trend Index, “Breaking down the infinite workday,” June 2025. Microsoft 365 usage data plus a survey of 31,000 workers in 31 markets.
Why email hits an operations desk harder
For most office jobs, an email is a conversation. On an order, purchasing or AP desk, an email is usually a task: open it, read the attachment, type it into the system, reply. Every one of those 117 emails can mean another round of copying.
The three kinds of email on an operations desk
| Kind | Examples | What software can do |
|---|---|---|
| Work that starts something | A customer PO, a supplier invoice, a quote request | Read it and draft the order, PO or invoice match in your system for a person to approve |
| Questions | "Where is my order?", "When does it ship?" | Draft the answer from the status already in your system |
| Everything else | FYIs, newsletters, internal threads | Sort it out of the way |
Count yours in 15 minutes
- Open the shared inbox for one desk (orders@, purchasing@ or ap@).
- Take the last 50 emails and mark each one: work, question or other.
- For the work emails, estimate the minutes each one takes to enter.
- Work emails × minutes, per week, is the time software can take off that desk.
Then put that number in the automate-first scorecard.
Real example: Atlantic Food Bars. A Dallas-area manufacturer of hot and cold food equipment for national grocery chains, with 8 people in the office and 2 plants, handling dozens of orders a day. The office was about to hire another person (a $60,000+ a year seat) to keep up. Instead, software now reads each order email and fills out the work, and the team checks it in about a tenth of the time. It was built around how their team already worked, and what their veterans knew now lives in the system, so new people get up to speed fast. Read the case study →
FAQ
How many emails does the average office worker get a day?
117, according to Microsoft's Work Trend Index (June 2025), based on Microsoft 365 usage data. Most are skimmed in under a minute.
How often are office workers interrupted?
Every 2 minutes during core work hours, by a meeting, email or chat (Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2025). The busiest fifth of workers get 275 pings a day.
Can AI handle order and invoice emails?
Yes. Software can read a PO or invoice email and its attachment and draft the entry in your system. A person checks and approves each one.
Where should I start?
Count the last 50 emails in one shared inbox. If most are work that gets retyped, start with that desk.
Get more out of every person in your office.
Peekgentic is a Dallas firm that builds custom software around the way your team already works: orders, purchasing, invoices, spreadsheets, email. Not a one-size-fits-all platform you have to bend your process to fit. Your know-how goes into a system that's simple to use, so a new hire gets up to speed fast. We'll come watch how your office runs for 20 minutes and tell you straight where it's worth automating.