Google just sent my monthly email summary. In the past month, on only my work email account, I sent 1,000 emails and received 1,819 emails. I’m sure plenty of people send and receive many times more emails than this. But, I would like to opine for a second on how much time ’emailing’ consumes. Query: how to decrease this time sink and afford more time for creativity?

If, on average, I spend 5 minutes on each email I send and 3 minutes on each email I receive, in aggregate I spent about 174 hours ’emailing’ the past four weeks.

I do not know if my 5 and 3 minute estimates are accurate, but if they are, that’s a frightening amount of time emailing. If you call a working day 10 hours (which I do not, but let’s say 10 hours for the sake of it), then I spent more than 17 days out of the last 28 strictly emailing! If I work 6-days/week and 10 hrs/day (I usually work many more, but that’s besides the point), then I emailed 17/24, or 70% of the time. Yikes.

There must be a better way to communicate.

And, if I spend this much time emailing, I’m not leaving a lot of time for creativity and invention (much less time to educate myself on various topics of interest) — some of the really important to-dos.

JT
Raleigh, NC