A Ramble on Email

Just how much of our current communication goes though a communication channel that is not face to face? This is a question I was thinking about today when I was asked about my email inbox status. How many of us take for granted our email? We can communicate with others on the other side of the earth in minutes instead of weeks for a paper letter.

Having said that, how many of us use email incorrectly? I know I do.

I usually tell people to email me instead of call me. The reasoning for this is because if I have the information in email, I can't lose it between cracks in the desk or delete a voice mail on accident. But that opens up a new issue of having to track all that email. It can also make the conversation take longer than a phone call or to have a detached feel. However, on the upside, it allows me to have the conversation at my pace and at my time, instead of the caller's pace and time.

So far, I have gotten 306 emails today that were not moved to a another folder by the rules I have created. Of these 306, I only needed to reply to 39 of them, and a total of 97 were 'useful' to me in some fashion. The rest were notifications of unrelated project status, something I was copied on and didn't need to action, or something I didn't even need to see. That puts the 'usefulness' percentage of email to about 32% for me today. The other 68% wasn't spam, but it wasn't required from my point of view.

Like most, I use folders to organize the emails I get into projects or people or something like that. I also have 37 rules that sort my inbound email into different folders so I can review the most important emails first. Without those rules, I would be drowning in a sea of electronic paper. As a side note, The spam filter used here at work also has to be one of the best on the planet; I have gotten exactly 2 spam emails in the last 7 years or so. That has to be a record or some sort.

Remember the 306 emails I mentioned earlier? Let's put some time behind that number. Assuming it takes me 20 seconds to read an email and 30 seconds to craft a response, those 306 emails took up 122 minutes of my day today. A full 2 hours doing nothing but responding to email. What is the likelihood that those 2 hours were spent doing the most productive thing I could be doing?

What are the total stats on my email inbox? If you really must know, here you go.



My full inbox accounts for 16.9 gigabytes, and most of those emails don't have attachments since I have a process that moves attachments from email and stores them in the file system once the email hits a certain age. Picking one folder (inbox) at 26 MB which contains 1149 emails, the average size of an email that I don't delete is about 22Kb. That means my total email count is around 750,000. A full three quarters of a million. I have had this account for about 7 years, so on average I have kept about 290 emails per day. Assuming a 10 hour workday, that is one email every 148 seconds. That also means I have spent 4166 hours in the last 7 years just reading email at 20 seconds per email. There are only 2080 hours in a standard year of work.

So here I sit, writing an article about reading and writing too many emails. What has the world come to?