I work in the military-industrial complex, and I try to maintain a clean, minimalist inbox. I’m one of those people that sort through my inbox and either move/delete stuff that’s not applicable or has been acted upon–as opposed to some of my co-workers who leave everything there.
One or two geological epochs ago, approx 5.0 - 0.01 BCE ("Before COVID Era") I traveled for work pretty frequently, normally in week-long blocks. Upon my return, as we all have, I had an onslaught of unread emails to go through. I’d normally block an entire day to ‘put out the fires’ and slog through a couple ‘o’ hundred emails, taking action on what needed attention, and deleting the OBE (“Overcome By Events”) or obsolete traffic. Well, come 2020, COVID hit, and business travel came to a hockey stop of a halt.
2.0 CE hit (“COVID Era”) rolled around and business travel was allowed again. I thought to myself, “Self, just how much of my email is acutally useful?” I took a couple of trips, and amassed a reservoir of data on each trip to analyze. I need a large pool of data to do this kind of study. Looking at emails onesy-twosey is time consuming, as opposed to handing a “batch” at a time. But, here goes:
The Categories:
I aimed to keep things simple, yet memorable, that I could try to go with my “gut instinct” in 10 seconds or less per email. In lots of individual emails, this is easy (just look at the subject line). Some take a little more investigation. . . but here’s how I break 'em down.
To Me: Sent by a human, where my name, and possibly up to one other, is in the “To” line of the email.
At Me: Sent by a human, where my name, and starting at two additional names, are in the “To” line. I consider this the arbitrary starting line of a “shotgun email.” Also in this category are:
- Emails sent by an automated service (e.g. our employee training system, or an emergency notification),
- Anything sent to a mailing list I’m a member of which seems to proliferate exponentially.
Actionable: Subject matter requiring my action, either to earn a carrot, or avoid a stick. Examples include:
- “Need your size for a company-logoed, company-provided polo shirt.”
- “Tripler, update your portion of the slide deck and send back to me.”
- “Training for hazardous materials handling is due, and if not taken by 7/15/2022, your certification will expire.”
- “Your expense report needs an additional hotel reciept upload.”
- “Tripler, which sixteen units of the fifty do you want to test?”
Informational: Subject matter that does not require action, and could be also labelled “FYI,” “FYSA,” or “gee whiz.” Examples include:
- “Sign up now for the Engineering symposium in August.”
- “Uncleared workers will be on the second floor from 9:AM - 11:AM”
- “Lost earring found in the lobby.”
- “Technical Area Bravo Tango will be closed down for the next week for site maintenance.”
I have been doing informal studies in the past, but can’t find those notes. But that’s a discussion for another day.
New data:
I just got back from a ‘double-header’ of trips, with my ‘Out of Office’ notifications set for Friday, June 24th, through Wednesday, July 6th. I made it a point to delete nothing from my inbox, but admittedly, I wasn’t responding while on the road either. This trip, I had a relative low of unreead emails in my inbox (116), which I suspect is due to the holiday weekend.
After coming in on Thursday, adjudicating the inbox and crunching the numbers, here’s the data.
From 6/24-7/6/22 | At Me | To Me |
---|---|---|
Informational | 93 (80.17%) | 7 (6.03%) |
Actionable | 8 (6.89%) | 8 (6.89%) |
Data Points (Total emails in inbox) = 116 |
The Takeaway:
Facts:
- Less than 15% (6.89% + 6.89% = 13.78%) of my email is “actionable”.
- Less than 15% (6.89% + 6.03% = 12.92%) of my email is “to me”. The arbitrary ‘shotgun email’ line is open to debate.
- The vast majority of my email is “information shotgunned at me” (80.17%).
- I have had neither carrot nor stick in deleting the vast majority of the emails in my inbox.
- I spent more time formatting this OP, than I did collecting, analyzing, and reporting on data.
Interpretation/Opinion:
- “Information shotgunned at me” is useless, and a waste of time.
- The “shotgun line” (3 or more names in the ‘To’ line) is kinda arbitrary.
Future Thoughts:
I’ll update this thread periodically after future business trips, to generate more data, to see if I can derive means and standard deviation on all of this. What I’m hoping to do, is inspire some other Dopers to do a similar study, to generate more data. I’m also open to further refining definitions.
There you have it: **There is nothing more meta than a caffeinated Engineer reporting statistics on his email traffic. **
Tripler
It’s instant, this morning, BTW.