A wise man once said: "Don’t confuse motion with progress." That could also be applied to email volume. I use X1’s desktop search engine on my work computer, which indexes all of my email/attachments/docs/etc… I am a pack-rat with email, and have archived every single email I’ve received at my current company. I was recently in a meeting where we were discussing email proliferation and our reliance on it as a collaboration tool, and I decided to run a couple of queries with X1 to see what my usage looked like. Here’s this relatively useless, but scary, information:
Range: From June 2003 – December 5, 2006
Received Email Stats:
- Total Emails: 130,000 emails
- Total Emails with attachments: 31,341
- Top Email Sender (either To or CC’d me): 4194 (and counting)
- PowerPoint Presentations Sent to me: 1199 (and counting)
Sent Email Stats:
- Total Emails I’ve Sent: 32,417 emails
- 2004 Emails Sent: 8704 emails
- 2005 Emails Sent: 9293 emails
- 2006 Emails Sent (and counting): 11,332 emails
All of this totals up to about 8GBs of information sitting in several .pst files on my computer. Does any of this total up to productivity? Hmmm…