A week without e-mail?
Last year ended with about 12,500 items in my Sent Mail box at work. As expected, the tally destroyed previous years: 2,000 e-mails in the last third of '03. 8,850 in '04, 6,200 in '05, 5,800 in '06, and 8,100 in '07. Last year saw about 34 sends every day or about 51 every day "worked" (about seven per hour "worked," or one about every eight and a half minutes). Productive or the opposite? The debate rages on.
But here's my problem. Or one of them. My company is furloughing all of us for one week this quarter, and beyond the obvious financial frustration, there's an e-mail issue. To comply with furlough laws, we're not allowed to send any work e-mail during our time off. That's seven days — with regular weekend/days off enforced — without a send.
Thanks to Outlook's Message Timeline feature, I've found my furlough week will be a time of deep, deep e-mail withdrawal. Since joining the company in August '03, I've managed to go seven days without a send only once. The beach trip of July '05 saw a monastic nine-day stretch.
Earlier vacations saw a pair of six-day runs. But the trend has sprinted the other way since. I maxed at four days in '06. In the last two years, the four-day run has happened only once, around New Year's '08. The rest of last year proceded with one three-day period. This is trouble.
(Update: Since writing this post, I've learned we can't even read e-mail during the furlough. Thank you, government. This is more trouble.)
January 24th, 2009 at 7:13 AM
Good luck Patrick! Just thinking about it makes me nervous…I'm an e-mail junkie too. :)
January 24th, 2009 at 7:01 PM
Thank you! Can you imagine? If they would just go ahead and lock us out of the accounts for that week, it'd be so much easier. It's like a forbidden fruit thing … except nothing bad can happen to you and you know you're going to have to eat hundreds of pieces of fruit when you get back to work to make up for it.