...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?

You can CLOSE Outlook?!

I spent last weekend at a great workshop for new physics and astronomy faculty hosted by the American Association of Physics Teachers, the American Physical Society, the American Astronomical Society, and the National Science Foundation. The second-to-last session was titled "Time Management" in the schedule.

The actual title of the session was "Doing What Matters."

As a Christian, I found this title---and the accompanying theme---intriguing. The speaker's main point was, "Your job is not to manage your time. Your job is to pursue what matters."

He offered a challenging way to make sure we have the time to pursue what matters: Turn off our e-mail for one hour a day.

You could feel the entire room seize up when he said this, but we knew he was right. We knew that the reason it takes us a day to grade an exam or a week to "finalize" a proposal or a month to go so say, "Hi," to that colleague we haven't seen all semester is because of the near-incessant "BAY-DOO!" that directs our attention to the lower-right-hand corner of the screen, in the hopes that it will provide us with something more interesting than what we're doing at the moment.

So, I accepted his challenge. I'm writing this on Tuesday night, and for the last two days I've found the "Close" button on Outlook and left it off for one hour at a time.

And it was amazing what I could get done! I got all my notes from the Workshop typed up in what seemed like no time. I was able to take some thoughts from the weekend and outline a few grant proposals. I even got my afternoon lab ready this morning with hours to spare.

I'll close with the following point and a proposed experiment: One of the reasons this discipline works is because the amount of e-mail one receives is directly proportional to the amount of e-mail one sends. Thus, I'd like to propose to graph the number of e-mails I receive each hour this week along with the number of e-mails that I send each hour day. I'll post the results on Tuesday of next week. I invite you to do the same!