How Much Time Do You Spend on Email Each Day?
A Japanese mentee emailed me last week, apologizing for being late on a promised response and explaining that she had been swamped with other work, including “20 emails a day.”
My first thought was, “Only 20?”
That got me thinking about my own never-ending battle to rule over my email inbox rather than have my email inbox rule over me.
Here’s how it breaks down…
I get an average of 150 emails a day.
About 20 of them are reports from my main client, a digital information publisher based in Baltimore. I don’t spend a lot of time reading them, but if I notice an anomaly – significantly higher or lower sales than usual – I dig in.
Another 50 are free subscriptions to various online newsletters and other digital information services. I subscribe to them because their subject matter falls within my scope of interest and because they are, in my opinion, well written. I spend at least a half-hour every day scanning, selecting, and filing the essays and articles I think I might use for my blog or my personal journal.
I get about 20 pieces of advertising or promotional email every day, too – mostly offers from the above-mentioned free subscriptions. I never take the bait because I get so much useful and interesting information for free. Well, that’s not entirely true. I have “upgraded” three or four of my 50 free subscriptions because they are so good that I felt the need to pay them something.
Another 30 emails are group-sent business memos, all of which I read and about half of which I reply to, either briefly or at length.
And finally, I get 20 to 30 emails each day sent to me by individuals – colleagues or friends and relatives.
Those from colleagues I answer immediately. The emails from friends and relatives I often make the mistake of putting aside until I feel I can give them the time they deserve, which means I’m usually obliged to begin each one with, “Sorry I didn’t reply sooner, but…”
What this boils down to is about 25 outbound emails a day, which, at one-sixth of my inbound volume, seems about right.
If you are still reading this, you may be wondering why you are still reading it. My answer is that I don’t know, except you probably have the same strain of OCD that I have, and you should (we should) spend less time each day reading and responding to email. (And much less time tracking everything we do.)
