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Everybody knows email is a productivity killer. A 2012 study (The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies) by the McKinsey Global Institute found that 28% of the average work week is spent with email. That amounts to 2.25 hours per day. The same study also found that employees spend an additional 19% of their work week, tracking down the information required to complete tasks (and we're betting you store a lot of this information in your email). So put the two numbers together and you will see that email, along with search, consumes almost 4 hours (or half) of the average workday!

With such a large chunk of time at stake, it is critical to our productivity to identify what contributes the most to email time suck and eliminate it. And considering the vast amount of information that we store in our email, it's actually quite easy. All clues point directly to Email Search as the main candidate for consideration and elimination.

Surprised? Think about it. Who hasn't spent long, frustrating minutes wading through hundreds of messages, opening and closing several of these, in search of an email that you know is there, but just can't seem to get hold of? And God help you if you have multiple folders to look through!

The native search abilities of many email clients don't seem to help either. How many times have you abandoned your email client's native search capabilities (which seem to exist for the sole purpose of frustrating you) in favor of searching your inbox manually? Many, many times, we are sure.

It's no wonder then that email search sucks up so much of your work day. So what can you do about it? Watch this space and we'll tell you how you can beat the time suck caused by email search and reclaim your day.