For the third year in a row, I’ve decided to track the number of emails I send and recieve at work.  For context, I rarely delete emails, get very little spam, and commit to reading almost every email I receive (in 2008, I left about 60 emails unread). 

Here are the final numbers for 2008:

Number of Emails Received in 2008: 12,517
Number of Emails Written in 2008: 3,383

Given an average of 200 workdays per year, this works out to about 63 messages received each day, and 17 messages written…

Here’s my stats from 2007 and 2006:

Number of Emails Received in 2007: 15,649
Number of Emails Written in 2007: 3,428

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

It will be interesting to watch as the data changes the next couple of years.  Is the decline in emails sent each year a product of my learning to only send email when it is the best medium for the task? Or am I crafting emails in such a way that follow-up emails are required less frequently?  Or is there some other environmental factor at play?

Regardless of the reasons that may have driven my email traffic down last year, I’m still reading and writing email as the primary tool in my day to day work.

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