Email Archive as a Journal (a sad reflection of how much time I spend using email)
Published February 8, 2007 by Robbie
Since 2001, I’ve kept every email I’ve sent. Since 2002 I’ve kept every non-spam email I received. As my wife would attest, I’m a packrat, and when it comes to computer related things I’m no different. I don’t keep a journal (besides this blog), but have found my saved email to serve a similar purpose. It is interesting to review emails I sent or received at a particular time to see what was going on in my life.
Some of the emails I receive, I put into personal folders. Everything else gets “deleted” and put into a deleted folder. I create yearly personal folders for Sent and Deleted items. So I have a “2006 Sent” folder and a “2006 Deleted Items” folder all the way back to 2001. Within Outlook, you can have a folder display the number of items contained within it. By browsing these archived personal folders, I can see a) how many emails I sent in a given year and b) how emails I received (roughly). Again, not all of the emails I receive go into the Deleted folder, but the majority of them do.
It is interesting to look back and see the volume of emails sent and received over the last 5 years. Here is the breakdown:
Sent:
2001: 4,507
2002: 6,106
2003: 4,865
2004: 8,511
2005: 7,186
2006: 5,635
Deleted:
2002: 32,713
2003: 58,593
2004: 27,089
2005: 22,796
2006: 22,720
I’m not sure why 2003 had over twice the “average” deleted mail. Perhaps I didn’t do a good job of deleting all of the spam. It is also interesting that in 2004 I sent the most email. I don’t recall either 2003 or 04 being busier than other years.
In terms of averages, the numbers aren’t very pretty. I’m averaging almost 33,000 deleted emails per year (although recent years are much lower). That’s 90 NON-SPAM emails per day, 365 days a year, for 5 straight years. Obviously during the weekdays the numbers are actually much higher and the weekends they are much lower. If I had to guess based on the number of non-deleted emails I’ve saved, it could add another 10 to that for roughly 100 per day.
The number of sent emails should be much more precise since every email I send automatically goes into my Sent folder. I’ve averaged 6,100 emails sent per year for 6 years. That’s a rather astonishing 17 emails per day that I’ve sent for 6 years. Am I really sending that many?? I get a whole lot of email, but I’m also doing my fair share to contribute to the email deluge.
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While the aggregate statistics are quite intriguing, I think you might be interested to see what tools such as the new Microsoft SharePoint behavioral analytics & knowledge analysis tools could uncover. I’m sure there are other tools as well.
Example-
Wouldn’t it be interesting to learn what topic(s) you discussed most? - Who you corresponded with the most, Who you most often mentioned in e-mails to others ? - Potentially even estimating the time you spend based on the duration between e-mail time-stamps during rapid-fire reply/routing sessions and who replies to you the quickest as well ?
I also have used Outlook as a journal and was recently was asked why I categorize my time in a certain way. While the analysis was manual, knowing that day I’d spent over 6 hours just replying/routing e-mail, it made for quite a surprising look into why working on a single topic or completing tasks often requires conference calls or off-site meetings.
One of the startups I’ve worked with provides all sorts of interesting email usage analysis. Check out Xobni.