A data study; aka 'Tripler's evolving thread on workplace email' (i.e. how much is useful)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

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.

2

I set a rule on such emails to put them, along with emails where I am only cc, into a separate folder. My Inbox is cleaner, and I can go through the other folder really quickly, after I deal with my Inbox.

I continue to be amazed by the number of people who expect me to answer an email where I am only in cc. If you really need an answer from me, use @ to notify me.

3

I get about 40 or 50 work emails a day, most of them nonsense. I have created and use several subfolders daily in order to keep my main inbox spartan.

Last week, a co-worker, looking over my shoulder, noticed that there were only two items in my inbox. She looked as me as if my nose had just morphed into a penis.

mmm

4

I had done this back in my previous career, to include rules where when sent from certain people (the Colonel or a GS-15), it would go to a special “High Profile” box. This new company, with it’s nature has given me “eight different bosses customers,” rendering that rule kinda moot. Same with a “To” or “CC” rule–it’s a crapshoot on whether the addressing matches the intent of the message: I’ll be CCd as a tasking, or To’d as a CC.

But, rules interfered with this study. I needed an as-pristine data set.

Tripler
“Spartan inbox”: Molon reply-to-all labe! :smiley:

5

I have a client who has 40,000 unread emails in her inbox.

6

I would kill to apply my categories to a data set that large!

Tripler
I’m gonna need some more coffee.

7

I have all my non-spam emails. Oh, wait, no I don’t, I lost 1993-1994. And I was selective in what I kept back in the era when emails were sent and received from the University mainframe and had to be downloaded to a floppy and taken home if you wanted to keep 'em permanently. But I have most of them.

For eons my carefully designed email filter formulas would sort the inbound emails into the appropriate folders automatically. But as the spammers ramped up, I made my anti-spam rules tighter and the final result was that nobody who isn’t affirmatively on one of my address books lands in Trash, and so I fish out possibly non-spam and read it and move it to In (or a specifically appropriate folder), and real email is always overwhelmingly in the minority. So Trash by default unless I know you.

The In mailbox only contains the last two months’ worth. Older stuff gets moved to Inbox Archives CurrYear and then at some later point into (let’s say) Inbox Archives 2020-2025.

Former employers have their separate email boxes as subfolders under a Former Employers folder. Current employer stuff is in a folder of a similar type but loose at the root since they actively still come in, of course.

I’ve got great search so it’s useful. I can quickly search for

From does not contain ‘group within the org that won’t be relevant’ or ‘other similar group’ AND
Date is after 9/1/2020 AND
Date is before 3/1/2022 AND
Body contains ‘suggested guidelines’
Mailbox is either CurrentEmployer or Out
AttachmentCount >0

8

Personal request: please discontinue using common abbreviations, acronyms, etc for this sort of, forgive me, dippy shit. I get what you’re trying to go for but I can’t finish reading your OP with that.

9

Is it the acronyms, or the subtext after it?

I often use acronyms in my professional email traffic, and it’s just become a habit. “OBE” is common to me (and I thought here on the Dope too), but I thought I’d spell out “BCE” as I saw it in humorous but not-so-common use.

Tripler
Honest question.

10

BCE is Before Common Era (previously BC) when used for a date, period. However, my earlier post is far more dickish than I hope to be around here and I apologize for my tone.

11

Ah! I see! I’d seen/used my BCE as an intentional play-on-words of the ‘academic’ use. Your post piqued my interest, given my sometimes-overuse of acronyms, and wasn’t taken as a poke in the eye. We’re cool. . . we’re cool.

Tripler
This cool: :penguin:

12

I put a 2 year retention policy on my mailbox. If it’s over 2 years old and I don’t have it saved somewhere else, it wasn’t that important.

My boss, on the other hand, CCs himself on every email he sends.

13

I bet 5,000 quatloos that your boss is unaware of a folder called “sent” or “sent items.”

14

This is a huge problem: correspondents who either don’t know or care about the significance of those two address forms.

I’ve seen this enough that I cannot in good conscience (or in good risk avoidance) rely on being “CC” addressed solely for information or situational awareness. The mandatory action I need to take to avoid terminating my career is every bit as likely to be addressed to me on the “CC:” line.

15

I work on a DoD site and everyone here loves to send email to the entire base and “Reply All,” despite the repeated trainings and reminders to not do that. I’m also a person who checks, opens, reads, and deals with my email regularly, like every 5-10 minutes. Only things that get left in the Inbox are things I need to address, then once they are, they are labeled and archived.

I’ve got my work email set up to filter everything into three basic categories: messages from people in my department, messages from outside my department specifically addressed to me, and then there’s everything else. I call them “[my department],” “To me,” and “The Pile,” respectively.

Things in the first category are about 5% actionable by me, and most of the remaining 95% are attendance related (“I’ll be out of the office today,” “I’m out sick today,” “I’m away from my desk for the next 2 hours,” etc.).

Things in the second category are almost 100% actionable by me, but this is by far the least populated category. I only get about 1-2 of these a week, maybe, and most of those are just mandatory training notifications or timesheet reminders.

The last category is by far the most numerous, and fully 0% of these are actionable by me. Just base news, newsletters, security department notices, lecture announcements, training opportunities, etc. All just stuff that’s literally just emailed to “base.ALL”

16

I work for a contractor to the federal government. About 85% of my daily emails are completely useless. Maybe 95%.

Reminders that the central IT office will be doing something unrelated to my needs during the night when I am not at work. Notices that Bob, the head of some department, is out of the office today and Bill will be acting today. At least a dozen daily notices of who is acting in each department today. I do not give a shit, I will leave a message for Bob if I need something, because Bill is just going to wait for Bob to get back to work anyway.

Sue in accounting has held many positions here and it is her five year anniversary; here is what her supervisor has to say about Sue!

Shot gun blasts across the bow because someone, we never know who, did something minor wrong and so we are all getting told not to do it, and here is some required training that you need to sign off on just so HR can have it on file. Just so we can prove that you have been told.

I took this whole week off. One day was a holiday. I can look forward to a couple hundred useless emails when I return to work next week, that will take 2 or 3 hours to read and delete looking for the 5 or 6 that may be relevant to my job.

Oh, and I cant check my work realted emails from home while I am off work, because they are afraid that they may have to pay me for my time reading them.

17

No, he uses his inbox as his to-do list. Even after we finally started using a ticket system, he would email everything in to the ticket system and CC himself. He couldn’t understand why we didn’t want to work that way.

18

Methinks you and I work for the same contractor. Your post, is damn near verbatim, what I omitted from my OP.

I still don’t give a hoot about Sue in accounting.

Tripler
Now, Herbert Kornfeld. . . there’s a man to be reckoned with.

19

A new update!

I had a double-header of trips that kept me out of the office from July 19 - August 14 2022. Because, on on the latter of those trips, I brought home a li’l extra respiratory-based souvenir, the below data is going to include some points from today as well.

I realize now that I’ve collected all the data, I’ve goofed up. I did a four-square table of At Me and To Me neglecting to correspond their own Informational and Actionable categories. This time, I accidentally did a simple count of things, in a 2 x 2 table, which I blame on the Fog-of-War COVID.

Anyway, here goes:

From 7/29-8/15/22 SImple Counts
At Me 191 (84.14%)
To Me 36 (15.85%)
Informational 195 (85.90%)
Actionable 32 (14.09%)
Data Points (Total emails in inbox) = 227

I’ll have to look at this thread again next time, before I start collecting data. I should be setting up a table like my OP, in a 3 x 2 table, to look like this:

Dates At Me To Me
Info - -
Action - -

Unfortunately, I deleted all of the informational and at me emails, stripping it down to what I need to keep for next week. I can’t go back and repeat the collection. :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

Tripler
I couldn’t let it wait. I’m restless between fevers.