How much time do you actually lose to repetitive typing?

Seconds don’t feel like much

Nobody notices 20 seconds. That’s why repetitive typing never shows up as a problem. It hides inside every reply, ticket and form, one small chunk at a time.

For a sense of scale: the average typist manages about 52 words a minute^[1]. A three-sentence reply of around 50 words takes roughly a minute to write, before you’ve thought about what to say. And most of us type a lot of them. People whose jobs run on communication spend around 28% of the week on email alone^[2], and the average Microsoft 365 user spends 57% of their time communicating in meetings, email and chat^[3].

Where the time actually goes

Typing the same 20-second reply 15 times a day

“Thanks for reaching out, I’ll look into this and get back to you today.” You could type it in your sleep, and that’s the problem. It’s five minutes a day on one sentence you already know by heart.

Rewriting common explanations instead of reusing them

How to reset a password. Why the invoice looks different this month. How to run the project locally. You’ve explained each of these dozens of times, and each time you write it from scratch, a little differently.

Looking for something you already wrote

You wrote the perfect answer last month. It’s somewhere in Slack, or a closed ticket, or your sent folder. McKinsey found workers spend about 19% of their week searching for and gathering information^[2], and digging up your own old messages is part of that. Every search also means switching apps, and one study counted around 1,200 app switches a day, costing just under four hours a week in refocusing^[4].

Fixing small inconsistencies every time

A response you recreate from memory drifts. A link goes missing, a step gets skipped, the policy is worded slightly wrong. Then you spend time correcting it, or someone else spends time asking what you meant. Multiply that across a team and nobody’s quite saying the same thing.

Repeating boilerplate everywhere

Code review comments, PR descriptions, documentation headers, email sign-offs, the same answers in the same forms. None of it is hard. All of it is typing you’ve done before.

The math

Take one reply. Save 20 seconds on it, and send it 30 times a day:

20 seconds × 30 times a day = 10 minutes a day
≈ 3.5 hours a month
≈ 42 hours a year

That’s a full working week, from one message. Now apply the same arithmetic to the scenarios above. These are examples, not measurements, so swap in your own numbers. The monthly figures assume 21 working days.

Around half an hour a day doesn’t sound dramatic. Over a year it’s about three working weeks spent typing things you’ve already typed.

Work out your own number

Pick the thing you type most often and fill this in:

seconds each time × times a day × 21 ÷ 3,600 = hours a month

Do it for your top five and add them up. Most people are surprised, mainly because they’ve never counted.

It’s not only the minutes

The clock is the easy part to measure. The harder cost is what the interruptions do to the rest of your work. In one study, people who were interrupted finished their tasks just as well, but made up for it by working faster, and reported more stress, frustration and time pressure^[5]. Hunting for an old reply or rebuilding an explanation from memory is exactly that kind of small interruption, over and over.

Then there’s quality. The fifteenth rewrite of the same answer is rarely the best one. It’s the rushed one.

Getting the time back

The fix is typing automation, and the simplest form of it is a text expander. Save something once with a short trigger, and typing the trigger inserts the full text in whatever app you’re in. The 20-second reply becomes a two-second one. The explanation is the good version every time. Nothing to search for, nothing to switch to, nothing drifting.

That’s what we built JAST for. It works in any app on Windows and macOS, fills in names and dates for you, and keeps everything you type on your own machine. If you want to see what that looks like in practice, we put together 25 text expansion examples you can copy, and a look at why copy and paste isn’t the answer.

Common questions

How much time does text expansion save?

It depends on how much you repeat yourself. Saving 20 seconds on a reply you send 30 times a day is 10 minutes a day, about 3.5 hours a month over 21 working days, or roughly 42 hours a year.

How do I work out how much time I lose to repetitive typing?

Pick one thing you type often. Multiply the seconds it takes by how many times a day you type it, then by 21 working days, and divide by 3,600. That is hours per month. Do it for your top five and add them up.

What counts as repetitive typing?

Anything you have typed before and will type again: replies to common questions, explanations, templates, links, addresses, sign-offs, and the boilerplate in code reviews, tickets, documentation and forms.

Is typing automation the same as a text expander?

A text expander is the most common kind. You save text once with a short trigger, and typing the trigger inserts the full text in any app. Some also fill in dates, names and other details automatically.

Sources

1. The average typist in a study of 168,000 volunteers typed 52 words per minute. Dhakal, V., Feit, A. M., Kristensson, P. O. and Oulasvirta, A. (2018). Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes. Proceedings of CHI 2018, ACM.
2. Interaction workers spend about 28% of the workweek reading and answering email, and about 19% searching for and gathering information. Chui, M., Manyika, J., Bughin, J. et al. (2012). The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies. McKinsey Global Institute.
3. The average Microsoft 365 user spends 57% of their time communicating in meetings, email and chat, and 43% creating. Microsoft (2023). Will AI Fix Work? 2023 Work Trend Index: Annual Report.
4. Workers toggled between apps and websites about 1,200 times a day, losing just under four hours a week to reorienting afterwards. Murty, R. N., Dadlani, S. and Das, R. B. (2022). How Much Time and Energy Do We Waste Toggling Between Applications? Harvard Business Review.
5. People make up for interruptions by working faster, at the cost of more stress, frustration, time pressure and effort. Mark, G., Gudith, D. and Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress. Proceedings of CHI 2008, ACM.