Sometimes it feels like email is just taking over my life and there is no time to do anything productive. So I decided to pull up some statistics on my usage. I needed to find out how much email I send and receive and to/from whom.

OutlookStatView is a great tool for the job. Just download and run it. Select your date range and then save the file to csv. You can play with the data in Excel and pull up any fancy charts you need to.

Well here is what I learnt from my stats:

  • I get a ton of alerts but I don’t read most of them. Time to unsubscribe, or better still, subscribe someone else.
  • I send a lot more email to my colleagues then I get back. Time to stop sending out email. They could walk by and get the info they need. :)
  • I don’t reply to a lot of the emails from Clients and Vendors. That’s probably cause they cc me for no reason on every email. :(
  • 50% of the email I do read / action comes from just 8 people. Why do they rely on me so much?
  • 50% of the email I send out is just to 6 people. I wonder if it’s all work related. ;)

This seems like a good exercise to conduct every 3 months or so. Try it out and let me know what your email stats are like.