...and here are the results!

As promised last Thursday, here are the results from my e-mail experiment:

(Yes, I know my original proposal said I'd plot the number of e-mails each hour, but I couldn't figure out how to get Excel to do that!)

As you can see, there's definitely a correlation here. The question is whether this is caused by one of two hypotheses:

1. I receive more e-mails when I send more e-mails because the e-mails I receive are responses to the e-mails I send.
2. I send more e-mails when I receive more e-mails because the e-mails I send are responses to the emails I receive.
   

If Hypothesis 1 is true, then it would stand to reason that the number of e-mails marked "Re" that I receive should correlate roughly with the number of e-mails I send. This would indicate that I can reduce the number of e-mails I receive by reducing the number of e-mails that I send.

If Hypothesis 2 is true, then it would stand to reason that the number of e-mails marked "Re" that I send should correlate roughly with the number of e-mails that I receive. This would indicate that I can reduce the amount of time I spend writing e-mails by reducing the time I spend reading incoming e-mail.

So, this second chart plots the same data as the first, but now with the number of e-mails marked "Re" sent and received represented by the dashed lines:

So, is Hypothesis 1 true? Are the number of e-mails marked "Re" that I receive (the dashed blue curve) proportional to the number of e-mails that I send (the solid red curve)? Yes.

Is Hypothesis 2 true? Are the number of e-mails marked "Re" that I send (the dashed red curve) proportional to the number of e-mails that I receive (the solid blue curve)? Yes.

In fact, I notice two other things:

1. The two dashed curves are very well-correlated. So it looks like many of my responses are really responses to responses. Maybe it would be easier just to pop down to the person's office?
2. The solid red curve and the two dashed curves look very well-correlated, while the solid blue curve is more independent of the other three. Look at the huge disparity at the beginning of the week between the e-mails I receive (the solid blue curve), and the number of responses I send (dashed red curve). What are all these e-mails I'm receiving that I seem to not care about? How much time do I waste each week reading them?

In conclusion, I think I'm going to keep up my e-mail-off-for-an-hour-each-day challenge. It certainly seems like not all e-mail (or time spent on e-mail) is created equal.

What are your thoughts about this data? Have you noticed similar trends in your life? How else can we better discern where our time is going?