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I Send 160 E-Mails A Day. Am I A Bad Person?

This week I got one of those "holy crap" numbers thrown in my face that makes me seriously evaluate how I live my life. It didn't come from my savings account, cholesterol test, or bar tab. It came when I got a pop-up warning saying my E-mail system had exceeded capacity. So I cleaned out my Sent file, doing a select-all function. And there was the evidence: I sent 4,270 E-mails at work between February and July. That's 711 per month. At 22 working days a month, that's 32 E-mails every day. Four every hour, spewing out an E-mail every 15 minutes I'm on the job. And the calculation gets much, much worse.

Nearly every one of those 32 messages a day had at least one person cc'd -- many of them had 10, 20, even 30 people on the E-mail group -- so it's very conservative to multiply that number by five. That's 160 messages a day. So I interrupt 20 people every working hour with some bit of information. On average, someone gets an E-mail from me every three minutes.

Most of the research data on this issue works the other way: it tallies how much E-mail the average employee receives. It's cast in the "Woe is thee" tone -- poor information worker, getting thy productivity sapped by all this E-mail pouring into In Boxes. That's why this number's so depressing. I'm the E-mail villain. Apparently, the problem is spammers and me, Mr. E-Mail Every Three Minutes.

Get this -- I don't own a BlackBerry. So this astronomical figure doesn't even average out travel time when I don't have E-mail access, nor vacation or sick days. Near as I can figure, when I'm in the office, I don't do anything but frantically pound out E-mails, trying to make up for lost time.

Since I couldn't find much data on the topic (I am still looking, and will let you know what I find), let me know: Does sending out 160 E-mails a day sound like a person with a phone-phobia, who also thinks too much of his opinions? Or does it sound, I can only hope, like every other person you work with? Or even a bit like you?

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