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Quora
quora.com › How-many-emails-do-CEOs-and-senior-executives-at-large-companies-get-per-day
How many emails do CEOs and senior executives at large companies get per day? - Quora
Answer (1 of 2): I’ve been a senior executive at a number of companies, and I’ve worked closely with dozens of CEOs at large companies over the years. I get about 70 emails / day on average (including lower totals for weekends); if I only look at weekdays, we’re talking about 100 / day.
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Business Insider
businessinsider.com › business insider › careers › 100 ceos and top execs told us their email hacks — here are the top 7
7 Ways CEOS and Leaders Keep Email From Taking Over Their Day - Business Insider
August 21, 2026 - The schedules are different, but the idea is similar: Email gets a place in the day rather than constant attention. Roland Busch, the CEO of Siemens, gets about 200 emails a day and tries to keep fewer than 100 sitting in his inbox.
Discussions

How many emails do you get a day & how do you manage?
About 100 per day. But I'd say 1/3 of them are in my inbox before I even show up to work. I turn my notifications off overnight so I don't get pings waking me up at 5 am when my boss loves to email. At my previous consultancy it was easily 150 or more per day. Best way to manage is to answer all the urgent ones as they come. For non urgent ones, write all of the responses, save as a draft, and schedule those emails to go out at 5:30 PM when you're on the way home. For sales emails, unsubscribe or ask them to follow up next Quarter. Tip - when I go on vacation I put my OOO response on for an extra day or two since I know when I actually return the first day back is wasted catching up on emails or things I missed. Buys me extra time to responding. More on reddit.com
🌐 r/consulting
50
80
May 19, 2019
Tim Cook reads 700 - 800 emails per day. Is this typical for CEOs of large corporations?

Hes either lying or the bulk of thrm are just things he is cc’d on or alert reports from automated systems.

Im basically a speed reader and get between a hundred to two hundred a day and maybe thirty require action or responses. I usually do twelve hours a day in front of my computer working.

Any more than that is basically more than a human can really fully read and resoond to unless its super simplistic. The kind of emails you get as an executive are varied and typically complex.

More on reddit.com
🌐 r/EntrepreneurRideAlong
13
11
June 24, 2022
How Many Emails Do You Receive in a Day?
I probably get 15-20 that are worthwhile and then another 20-40 that are automated notifications of builds or something. I try hard to unsubscribe from stuff and tag appropriately in outlook. I can’t deal with 2/3 unread emails let alone hundreds or thousands that I see from some people. I’ve seen people with tens of thousands of unread emails and I wonder why they aren’t freaking out. More on reddit.com
🌐 r/sysadmin
211
259
May 10, 2020
How many email do y’all get in a business day?

60 - 80 on average, with about 20 needing in-depth replies with things I need to look up, research I need to do/write, etc. Sometimes one email takes an afternoon, so the other get moved to the to-do pile. Sisyphean.

More on reddit.com
🌐 r/highereducation
28
27
December 5, 2023
People also ask

Does a smaller company's founder really have it worse than a Fortune 500 CEO on this?
The available data doesn't measure founders directly, so this is a reasonable inference rather than a proven number: large-company CEOs in the study had assistants and chiefs of staff filtering their inbox, support most founders don't have. Removing that filtering layer plausibly increases the share of unprotected time email consumes, even if the study didn't measure it directly.
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norbelys.com
norbelys.com › home › blog › strategy › how much of a ceo's day actually goes to email? harvard tracked 27 of them to find out
How Much of a CEO's Day Goes to Email — Norbelys
Is the 24% figure the full picture of a CEO's email load?
No — it's specifically the electronic share of time spent communicating with someone else, from a study of 27 large-company CEOs. Solo review of an inbox, done outside a tracked communication interaction, and the 15% spent on phone and written correspondence (which often runs through the same inbox) both sit outside that specific number.
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norbelys.com
norbelys.com › home › blog › strategy › how much of a ceo's day actually goes to email? harvard tracked 27 of them to find out
How Much of a CEO's Day Goes to Email — Norbelys
Why does the study call email a 'dangerous time sink' specifically?
Because unlike a meeting or a call, an inbox has no natural stopping point — it will always accept one more message, so it tends to expand to fill whatever unclaimed time exists in a day rather than staying within a fixed block, which is exactly the mechanism the researchers flagged as costly for leaders.
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norbelys.com
norbelys.com › home › blog › strategy › how much of a ceo's day actually goes to email? harvard tracked 27 of them to find out
How Much of a CEO's Day Goes to Email — Norbelys
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Quora
quora.com › Is-it-normal-for-a-manager-to-receive-more-than-300-emails-a-day-How-many-emails-does-a-manager-director-CEO-receive
Is it normal for a manager to receive more than 300 emails a day? How many emails does a manager / director / CEO receive? - Quora
Answer (1 of 2): Depends a lot on the company and level of operational complexity but 300 is not abnormal. A lot of it will be CC on ongoing activities. Scan it, provide input only if it will correct direction or if a decision is needed. Help your team understand departmental and corporate goals,...
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RescueTime
blog.rescuetime.com › home › email like a ceo: how i get through 500+ emails a day (without going crazy)
Email like a CEO: How I get through 500+ emails a day (without going crazy)
November 29, 2018 - As a CEO, I often receive 500+ emails a day (not counting spam, which Gmail is pretty good about making sure I never see). I’m able to filter about half of those into folders that I’ll check as-needed.
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Thepurposeisprofit
thepurposeisprofit.com › 2015 › 09 › 25 › how-do-major-tech-ceos-deal-with-email
How Do Major CEOs Deal with Email? | The Purpose Is Profit
September 25, 2015 - By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker Have you ever wondered how many emails CEOs get and how they manage them? Apple’s Tim Cook says he receives 700 to 800 daily and that he reads each one and answers the majority. “I’m a workaholic,” Cook ...
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Yahoo!
yahoo.com › lifestyle › articles › 100-ceos-top-execs-told-091601777.html
100 CEOs and top execs told us their email hacks — here are the top 7
August 21, 2026 - Roland Busch, the CEO of Siemens, gets about 200 emails a day and tries to keep fewer than 100 sitting in his inbox.
Find elsewhere
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Norbelys
norbelys.com › home › blog › strategy › how much of a ceo's day actually goes to email? harvard tracked 27 of them to find out
How Much of a CEO's Day Goes to Email — Norbelys
August 2, 2026 - It’s one of those claims that gets repeated so often it stops sounding like something you’d need to check. Harvard Business School researchers actually checked it: they tracked 27 CEOs, 24 hours a day, in 15-minute increments, for 13 weeks ...
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Quora
quora.com › What-is-the-average-amount-of-time-that-CEOs-of-major-companies-spend-on-email-compared-to-other-tasks
What is the average amount of time that CEOs of major companies spend on email compared to other tasks? - Quora
Answer: CEOs get so much email (thousands per day) that they struggle to keep current. I know multiple CEOs who have abandoned email altogether. Any attempt at even a “curtesy” response of “No Thank You” to each email, turns it into a full time job. Every salesperson wants to hear a ...
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Business Insider
africa.businessinsider.com › home › careers › 100 ceos and top execs told us their email hacks here are the top 7
100 CEOs and top execs told us their email hacks — here are the top 7 | Business Insider Africa
August 21, 2026 - For nearly 17 years, Naya CEO Hady ... sends him a weekly report. That reduced the number of emails Kfoury receives by at least 150 a day....
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Slab
slab.com › blog › how-ceos-email
We Analyzed How 38 CEOs Send Emails—Here's What We Found - Knock Down Silos by Slab
March 19, 2019 - Karl Iagnemma, the CEO of nuTonomy, sends no more than 25 emails a day because spending any more time than that on email means he is taking time away from more important tasks.
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Inc
inc.com › home › a detailed study of ceo habits found that leaders spend 24 percent of their time checking email–and why it’s not always productive
A Detailed Study of CEO Habits Found That Leaders Spend 24 Percent of Their Time Checking Email--and Why It's Not Always Productive
January 29, 2025 - For the study, each CEO’s executive assistant was trained to track and code the CEO’s time in 15-minute increments, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Overall, the study collected nearly 60,000 CEO hours. Emailing took up about 24% of that time.
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Zippia
zippia.com › home › 75 incredible email statistics [2026]: how many emails are sent per day?
75 Incredible Email Statistics [2026]: How Many Emails Are Sent Per Day? - Zippia
February 11, 2026 - ... Approximately 347.3 billion emails are sent globally each day. This marks a 4.2% increase from 2022 when 333.2 billion were sent daily. Additionally, projections indicate that the number of emails sent per day will likely continue to rise, ...
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Templafy
templafy.com › how-many-emails-are-sent-every-day-top-email-statistics-your-business-needs-to-know
How many emails are sent every day? Top email statistics for businesses - Templafy
January 15, 2026 - The average office worker receives around 121 emails every workday. They send less, with just 40 being the average per day – but that number still adds up to a very large amount of emails organization-wide.
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/consulting › how many emails do you get a day & how do you manage?
r/consulting on Reddit: How many emails do you get a day & how do you manage?
May 19, 2019 -

I am not a consultant but found this subreddit after a search online so thought it would be a good place for this question.

1) How many emails do you get a day?

2) How do you manage them all?

I saw one guy said he was getting around 200-250 per day. That to me just seems entirely unmanageable. Seriously, how does anyone do an actual job when they are just getting bombarded by that number of emails. Even if many can be filtered out it's still an insane number. If you had a day or two off in the week you'd come in to 500 emails potentially.

For me:

  1. I get around 30-40 per day, but only around 20 would be for me

  2. Quite easy to manage that number. I have started to force myself to shut down Outlook around 11am - 3pm so I don't get caught in the trap of just replying to email after email and then just seeing more arrive.

One of my biggest bug bears is people sending needless emails. I tell some members of the team "don't send it, say it" - that refers to something like "Does anyone have any thoughts on what time we should do ABC?" which is something that you could easily just talk about for 3 minutes and resolve.

Top answer
1 of 30
100
About 100 per day. But I'd say 1/3 of them are in my inbox before I even show up to work. I turn my notifications off overnight so I don't get pings waking me up at 5 am when my boss loves to email. At my previous consultancy it was easily 150 or more per day. Best way to manage is to answer all the urgent ones as they come. For non urgent ones, write all of the responses, save as a draft, and schedule those emails to go out at 5:30 PM when you're on the way home. For sales emails, unsubscribe or ask them to follow up next Quarter. Tip - when I go on vacation I put my OOO response on for an extra day or two since I know when I actually return the first day back is wasted catching up on emails or things I missed. Buys me extra time to responding.
2 of 30
37
200-300 a day. Internal/company/non-sales/non-project emails I mark as read and usually never read them, but keep them in case I need to refer back to them. I read all client or project related emails. Anything that requires over 3 minutes to read, respond, and/or take action I flag to review later, otherwise, I read/reply as I see it so I don't have to spend more time to revisit later. All flagged items I read/reply to during downtimes like commuting to work, waiting in lines (hotel, airport, grabbing lunch), or in the hotel in the evenings. Coming back from vacation sucks, wading through the thousands of emails usually takes a few hours of attention, so I usually tackle these on the Monday morning flight.
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Fast Company
fastcompany.com › home › work life › how the most productive ceos keep email in check
How The Most Productive CEOs Keep Email In Check - Fast Company
April 28, 2017 - Karl Iagnemma, CEO of the self-driving car startup nuTonomy, is so sparing with email that he aims to cap his sent messages at 25 a day. Whenever he finds himself exceeding that threshold, it “usually means that I’m not spending enough time ...
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Klenty
klenty.com › home › cold email › crafting effective cold emails for ceos that get replies
Ultimate Guide on Writing Cold Emails To CEOs (5 Templates)
February 10, 2026 - C-suite executives are busy individuals with limited time and attention. They might receive anywhere between 100 and 200 emails per day. So, how will your cold email get their attention?
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Readless
readless.app › home › blog › email overload statistics 2026 (40+ sourced stats)
Email Overload Statistics 2026 (40+ Sourced Stats) | Blog | Readless
May 24, 2026 - 40+ sourced 2026 email overload stats — 376B daily emails, 126/day per professional, 28% of workweek. Radicati, Microsoft, McKinsey links inline.
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Business Insider
businessinsider.com › business insider › careers › strategy › the email habits of tim cook, bill gates, and 16 other successful people
The email habits of Tim Cook, Bill Gates, and 16 other successful people
December 21, 2016 - Every day, every day. I'm a workaholic." ... "As with many things in life, you have to manage your inbox, or it will manage you," the executive vice president of development and acquisitions at The Trump Organization and head of the Ivanka Trump lifestyle brand writes on Fortune. One strategy she employs to manage email inefficiency is to periodically search her inbox for frequent emailers, identifying those people who send "long, meaty emails that really are better discussed through conversation rather than electronically," and then she sets up a weekly check-in meeting with them to discuss ongoing questions or issues.