Back in 2003 I started tracking some numbers on my email use patterns, especially related to replies. I ran those old scripts on my 2004 mail and the numbers look pretty similar:

  • Of the 3236 emails I sent during 2004, 2094 of them were replies
  • My five most common response times in minutes were:
  • ten minutes: 40 times
  • thireen minutes: 36 times
  • sixteen minutes: 36 times
  • twelve minutes: 35 times
  • eleven minutes: 33 times
  • My mean response times was 22.36 minutes
  • My longest response time was 58.4 days.

The only really meaningful number there is the median response time and comparing it to 2003, I'm a lot faster in general.

My email volume by year is:

Year Emails Sent
2000 1920
2001 1799
2002 1920
2003 3136
2004 3236

Looking at that table it's pretty easy to tell when I started working from home again.

Here's the histogram for 2004:

email-response-times.png