Developing eWrite

A couple of weeks ago I wondered how many emails I send and receive every day. I was just curious, it wasn’t for any particular purpose really.

I thought it would be cool if my email client Thunderbird had an extension that could monitor my email habits and record the data for me. I considered writing an extension but then I had the idea of getting PHP to check my email inbox on a regular basis and record the info to a mysql database.

I wrote the PHP script and set it to check my email address every ten minutes from the 4th of September to the 15th of September.

On the 10th of September I read an interesting article on Slashdot titled ‘Why Email Has Become Dangerous‘. The article points to a study which states that it can take up to 64 seconds to recover your train of though after receiving an email. A person who checks their email every 5 minutes can waste up to 8.5 hours a week!

I don’t check my email every 5 minutes but I do have Thunderbird open all the time which checks the email every 30 minutes. Also, I have been known to search for wireless signals when Im out and about on my phone to check my email so Im probably just as bad.

Among other info, my PHP script told me how many emails I received each day. I decided to put this information together with the 64 seconds from the study and see how many minutes per day I was being distracted from whatever I was doing.

On average it seems Im distracted only 23 minutes or so per day, not much. Though thats only for one email address. I have 5 of them set up in Thunderbird and it doesn’t include the time involved in responding to them if needed.

Before knowing those results today, I knew I was checking my emails too much anyway. Today I changed my habits to try it out. I checked my emails early in the morning, at lunch time and coming up to 5pm. As a result I got a tonne of work done, 2 items that I thought would take me the day I completed before lunch. I spent the rest of the day mapping out the rest of the week, I plan on getting a lot done now if I can maintain this new habit of checking my emails only a couple of times a day.

A few people are probably going to be annoyed at first, there are a few people I work with that email me often and I’ve always responded immediately to them.

An interesting set of information for me, I’ll be aiming to keep this productivity up by not being distracted by emails every day.