How much time is needed to manage the inbox?

Davide Rizzo
5 min readMar 7, 2021

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The rising tide of inbox management time (Source: Davide Rizzo, 2021 CC BY 4.0)

Breaking up more than 1,000 hours of records of personal e-mail management in the higher education sector

The zero inbox is a forbidden heaven, the zen level out of the reach for many. Already in what we call now the ordinary — pre-pandemic — time, the e-mail message was like a tsunami, flooding the inbox sometimes in waves, sometimes with a constant yet inexorable tide. Though, during the first lockdown, I felt like the already high pace of inbox feed was even increasing, both in rhythm and quantity. So, I wanted to investigate better, to quantify ant to visualize this feeling.

Data from an associate professor in higher education

To frame this analysis, consider that I serve as an associate professor in a higher education master degree programme, with involvement in administration and research also. Our school is fully Microsoft-oriented and we use Outlook, namely Outlook 365. We use e-mail on a daily basis for communicating between colleagues and with students, even though Microsoft Teams is providing a very relevant alternative for easing easy-to-go exchanges.

More than five years analysed monthly

I recorded daily the time spent in managing the inbox from October 2016 to now (early March 2021), for a total amount of 1,074 hours. Just considering the central and complete years, the records vary from a minimum of 151 hours (2019) to a maximum of 329 hours (2020).

Considering a total of 210 working days per year, this corresponds to more than 1 hour per day to manage the inbox. Though, in 2020 the time spent to manage the inbox reached the unbearable level of almost 20% of a regular working week, which is almost one day per week.

Figure 1. Time spent managing e-mail. Direct month comparison.
The line race chart was made by using Flourish online app. You are free to reuse and adapt the data under the license CC BY 4.0, but you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. The colour scheme used in the graphics is based on the original Quintiles IMS Holdings Logo palette by colorboss on schemecolor.

To improve time management, I started tracking where does my time go by using Track, a freemium service provided by Toggl. On this platform, I monitor all of my activities day by day. Altogether, I charted the data by comparing directly each month from the year 2016 to early 2021 ( figure 1), also analysing the monthly amount in the same period ( figure 2).

Of notice, I started collecting data at the end of 2016, so this year is incomplete. In addition, during October 2016 I moved from Italy to France, so it was only during the end of the year that I really started receiving e-mails. I also show the early data from 2021, so keep the link to keep an eye on this page as updates might come for the upcoming months of 2021.

In the monitored period, the inbox management generally required the highest relative investment in April, with a comparable higher peak in February both in 2018 and 2021. 2020, the first year of the pandemic, was instead characterized by very high peaks in June and after the summer vacation, from September to November, thus expanding the seasonal October peak already recorded during 2017 and, in a lower amount, in 2018 and 2019.

Overview and emerging patterns

Intuitively, and hopefully, August is the month with the lowest amount of time required to manage the inbox, with a historical record of only 27 hours (Figure 2). On the contrary, October is by far the most intense period for inbox management for me, with a total amount of 149 hours, thus more than five times the time spent in August. Nonetheless, this task appears to have for me a bimonthly pattern on the spring semester, with recurring peaks in February, April and June. The e-mail wave is instead more consistent during the fall semester.

Figure 2. Time spent to manage e-mail: a monthly comparison.
The area chart (stacked) was made by using Flourish online app. You are free to reuse and adapt the data under the license CC BY 4.0, but you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. The colour scheme used in the graphics is based on the original Quintiles IMS Holdings Logo palette by colorboss on schemecolor.

During the year 2020, the first lockdown in France (17 March to 11 May) had apparently no special effect immediately, yet a remarkable increase arose in June. I spent roughly twice the time that I was used in the previous year, probably due to the lack of informal exchanges in the previous months. Unfortunately, this pattern remained also during the following semester, with an even stronger time span. The tide seems to continue. When I’m writing (8 march 2021) I already totalized 60 hours to manage my inbox, corresponding to the total time spent insofar in December.

Will the inbox flooding come to a stop?

Altogether, the time required to manage my inbox is constantly increasing. As so, it seems that I did not succeed at switching part of the communication on other channels. I tried to convert to MS Teams an increasing amount of the exchanges that I’m used to having through e-mail with students and colleagues, both for teaching, administration and research.

The result is that I spend now more time managing the messages across two platforms instead of one. In the background, I am not yet able to quantify the length and complexity of the messages that I receive in the inbox. To this, I can add the steady multiplication of invitation to webinars and other online events, as well as the preparation and feedback around the organization of online meetings.

In conclusion, I feel that colleagues and students, as well as myself, needed longer and more complex messages to fill the lack of informal meetings. As so, the inbox flooding might continue until we will come back to a stable and wider presence on-site. Unfortunately, this intermediate period of stop-and-go — “ the hammer and the dance” scenario largely anticipated by Tomas Pueyo last year — appears to be perceived as insufficient to communicate our usual professional needs.

Would we write so many emails if the time to receive them was longer?

Originally published at http://agronoter.wordpress.com on March 7, 2021.

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Davide Rizzo
Davide Rizzo

Written by Davide Rizzo

Agronomist doing research & teaching in (geographic) data management to understand agtech opportunities for farmers https://twitter.com/dav_rizzo

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