I’ve been working an alternative work schedule the past few months: Tuesday - Saturday. Working Saturday allows me to catch up on all the important things that aren’t really urgent during the week.

Occasionally, I also work on urgent things that have spilled over from the previous week if the workload becomes too daunting. However, my goal is to focus on the important, strategic, and development tasks that are so easily crowded out during a normal work week.

Once I completed the urgent and important tasks I had today, I spent a little bit of time performing some cleanup tasks I’ve neglected for too long. I typically rotate my saved email into folders by the year it was written/received. I like to do this during the week right after Christmas, because it is usually a quiet week. I took the week off this year, and didn’t get around to my email cleanup until today.

It always feels good to have a fresh start… and it is always interesting to see what kind of email traffic I endured the previous year. The numbers are never perfect - I delete a lot of email, and don’t keep junk mail - but it is shocking to see the sheer volume of email I receive and write…

Here’s my stats from 2006:

Number of Emails Received in 2006: 13,759
Number of Emails Written in 2006: 4,352

Given an average of 200 workdays per year, this works out to 68 messages received each day, and 22 messages written… Phew!

Filed under: Technology