How much time does it take to work on the microcopy?

TL;DR – the UX writing work takes a lot of time.

A simple feature, like a file upload box, can have tens of text strings. Others, like the onboarding process, can have several hundred. Most complex product features like an email editor up to 1000 or more.

Let's say you have 5 minutes to work on each string. You will spend 5 minutes on actions like creating the text, copying and pasting, or verifying existing content. Everything counts as work on microcopy (there are many more tedious actions).

Let's assume you're working on the email editor, and you need to take care of 1000 strings. Fire up your calculator and count:

5 × 1000 = 5000 minutes

5000 minutes / 60 = 83 hours

83 hours!

It can take eighty-three hours to take care of UX writing for a large product feature. If your workweek is 40 hours, you would be doing this for 2 weeks non-stop! And this means not eating, not going to the loo, not taking breaks, not even joining meetings – only staring at the screen, banging on your keyboard and going string by string. Not doable. Even a robot would overheat.

In reality, this will probably be at least a month of tedious work. And this could only be true if the writer works on a single project. Imagine the person sweating to support more!

Of course, the reality is even more rugged. You may spend a minute verifying some messages, but you can also spend hours working on a single piece of text.

My simplistic calculation is based on some remarks I heard in the past:

"It's just one button",

"It's only a heading",

"5 minutes and you're done"

Not really. It's a button or heading number 599 in the queue, and there are 400 more to go.