I feel, increasingly, that I am not coping well with my email. I just found some data to illuminate this. So here is what has happened to the raw number of emails sent and received over the past eight years.
This year so far (up to yesterday, the 29th October) I have 19357 emails, more than a thousand emails more than I did in 2010 or 2009. The mean is 65 per day, which seems about right. I get fewer than this at weekends and during some parts of the year, but I have noticed before that many workdays I send and receive about 90. These numbers seem terrifyingly large.
Even more annoying about this is that at the end of 2010 I signed off a load of email discussion lists, removed myself from some quasi-spam circulars sent by companies I’d bought things from and turned off a lot of email alerts from Twitter, Facebook, etc., in order to reduce the volume of email I was processing. The 2011 data includes this reduction.
Oh, and none of this is spam – these numbers exclude both the spam box and any spam emails that I manually removed from my inbox.
Looking at the 2011 data: Let’s assume each email takes me a minute to deal with (read or write; some are just discarded in a few seconds, others might take a few minutes; it’s a crude average). Then 19357 minutes is a little over 322 hours. Assuming a 7.5 hour working day (haha), this is 43 days. There have been 215 weekdays so far this year. Allowing for holiday and sick leave (I’ve had a bad year for the latter), this means I’m spending something like a quarter of my time processing email.
Some questions that arise from this analysis:
- Does this help me cope with my email? (No, but I feel less like I’m doing something wrong when I’m overwhelmed.)
- Is this normal?
- Is there anything I can do about it?
- Should I have taken the time used to write this post to clear some of my backlog?
- Should I have written a post about something less navel-gazing?
- What did I do with all my free time in 2004-6 when I had 10,000 fewer emails per year to deal with?
I think it’s normal. And not necessarily a problem. Much of my work is done by email that would otherwise be done on the phone or in face-to-face meetings. I think email is for many things more efficient. It can generate discussions which are not really worth the effort, but then so do other forms of interaction, and often the emails I don’t really need to send or receive are the ones that take very little time. I am also copied into things that don’t directly concern me, but which provide an efficient way for me to keep in touch with what is going on.
It is a problem if the volume of email is interfering with one;s ability to deal with one’s workload. That may just be a symptom that the workload is too great!
That’s an interesting take on being copied into things that don’t directly concern me. I tend to think “if this were all done by phone or meeting I would have just been told a summary rather than being sent the whole thing”. Perhaps I should learn to value the extra info I’m picking up that way.
Point taken about workload!
For closure, final count for email sent and received in 2011 (not including spam, etc.): 23,440.
Mean: 65 per day.
23,440 minutes is about 391 hours. Assuming a 7.5 hour working day (haha), this is just over 52 days. There were 260 weekdays in 2011. This maintains the figure of around a quarter of my time processing email (allowing for holiday and sick leave; assuming an average of 1 minute to read or write each email).