Do the Math Answer

If you receive an e-mail every seven minutes, that is 206 per day. Ninety of those, however, are Spam, and your Spam filter misses 45 of those. You'll spend 11.25 minutes deleting the 45 Spams, but we'll round that up to 15, or .25 or one quarter hour.

That leaves 161 useful e-mails, and if you average the answering time to 3.5 minutes (halfway between 2 and 5 minutes), then that will take 9.5 hours answering e-mail, and one-quarter hour (rounding up) in deleting Spam, making a total of 9 hours, 45 minutes dealing with e-mail. 

You also follow 1/10^th of the links in the e-mails (10 of them), which takes, on average, five minutes per link, so add another 50 minutes, or 10 hours 45 minutes.

If you work only an 8-hour day, then clearly, you can spend your whole day answering e-mail and still not catch up. 

Even if you don't answer it all, it can take you all day to answer the e-mail, a lunch hour included.  In 9.75 hours, by the way, you will receive another 84 e-mails (which will take almost more five hours to answer, during which time you'll receive another 42, which will take another 2.5 hours, during which you'll receive 21 which will take 1.2 hours, you see, it goes on forever). What you didn't finish today (say 5 hours) will be added to your load the next day. And so it goes.

So even when you spend your more than your full work day answering e-mail, you still fall five hours behind per day. Per day. Do the math.

My friend Chris Meeks suggests: "If you expect to do any other work, you'll just have to clone yourself."

Of course, that's going to be made illegal in the US, which means that people will just go to Mexico or England to have themselves cloned because, really, you aren't going to stop it.

In reality, it also means that you have to be careful and really see which e-mails are most important, and answer those, letting the rest slide until they e-mail again. Otherwise, you will get no work done (and if you really try to answer it all, have no life, or even time to sleep).

This problem is only going to get worse before it gets better. The best way to try to avoid it now is to make sure that your site gives people the info they need so they don't have to write. That's easier said that done, since they'll tend to e-mail since it's easier than finding the information on their own. So—what does that say? Make it easier for them to find the info so they don't have to e-mail you.

Good luck!

Go back to the story question (issue 51, "Do the Math")

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