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:
- 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.
- 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:
- 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?
- 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?
