How Much Time Have You Spent Sending E-Mail?

In Message Not Received, I argue that business folks e-mail too much.

Way too much.

How much? We send 144.8 billion e-mails every day. No, not all of them are business-related, but I’ve yet to meet a professional who complains that he or she doesn’t receive enough e-mails.

Am I against e-mail? Hardly. E-mail is an indispensable tool for business communications, but we misuse and overuse it.

E-mail as a medium suffers from massive limitations. It does not foster true collaboration. It cannot supplant in-person communications. Checking it incessantly takes more points off our IQs than smoking pot does. It’s terrible for project management. Many far better tools exist and have for a great deal of time.

I thought that it would be interesting and even a bit scary to estimate how much time I’ve spent just sending e-mails.

Go ahead and plug in your own numbers above. Microsoft’s SkyDrive makes this pretty easy to do.

What are your results? How many months have you spent just sending e-mails?

Vote on our poll!

Want the spreadsheet? Go for it.

The post How Much Time Have You Spent Sending E-Mail? appeared first on Phil Simon.