Analyzing my email...

Around New Years, many of us look back at the previous year and reflect about what we did and didn't accomplish.  Until now, I had never thought about analyzing my personal email usage but ToutApp makes that possible.  Here are some of the interesting stats from the analysis:

• I received 15,514 emails in 2011
• I responded to only 6% of the emails I received
• I sent 89% fewer emails than I received
• Of the emails I sent, 71% received a reply
• Tuesday is my busiest day of sending emails, February was my busiest month
• The most common email recipients (my inner 'Circles' as they call it) were my immediate family and my close friends at Chicago Booth
• I subscribe to a few different Google Groups and Alerts, which constitute a significant portion of the emails I receive
• Groupon and Living Social send me way too many emails, so did Facebook until I turned off alerts.

Although the above results are fun and interesting, what ToutApp found is not all that surprising. I could have told you that I received way more emails to my personal Gmail account than I send or that advertising based sites like Groupon and Living Social clutter my inbox on a daily basis.  Additionally, this analysis does not include my Chicago Booth email address that would add another 8K emails - most of which did not warrant a reply either.  

Perhaps the bigger insight into this report is that I don't think my results are that much different from anyone else.  So what does that mean?  Well, it could mean that there is a lot of noise in our inboxes which might diminish the effectiveness of email communication or email advertising.  This is not to say that email has no value, but rather that email might not be as memorable or have the same impact as a phone call or in-person interaction - things we seem to get fewer of these days.

~Marc

www.slidestacks.com

P.S.  For those of you who want to analyze your email using ToutApp, visit this link.  ToutApp only works with Gmail and requires access to your Contacts.  To revoke this access after the analysis is complete, you'll need to visit your Google dashboard, and then navigate to the Account heading where you can control which sites have access to your Contacts.  Also note that the analysis could take several hours to complete, and in my case, almost two days, so be patient :)