No, that doesn’t mean your email will spend a week sitting in my email inbox before I respond.

I’m talking about tracking a week in my inbox. What do I send? What do I receive? What’s it about? Do I send an email back? Do I receive another after that? You get the point.

This week, I was tracking all of those factors to get an overview of what a week in my inbox looks like. 

Then, I turned them into a visual, inspired by the Dear Data Project. This one actually took some ideas from Stefanie’s card for week 7. I thought this made a good visual because it allowed me to factor in a lot of my email habits– how long I spent on it, what I saw/sent it on, if it was a personal email or for something else, and so on. You can see a breakdown on the cards below of how exactly to read it.

What I found

• Most of my emails are pertaining to work, which makes sense to me. I get hundreds of emails a day, all sorts of news tips, viewer feedback and internal emails. I did have a few personal and school-related emails as well, which tend to fluctuate for me. This was a good week for those because I’m getting ready to go back to school, so I’m emailing somewhat with professors and regarding jobs.
• It’s hard to draw the line of what “interacting” with an email looks like. I tend to read at least the subject line and the preview of the message for every email I get a notification on my phone for, and pretty often I do the same in my work inbox. I had to draw the line somewhere, because I would’ve been tracking way too many emails, so I limited it to emails I actually opened. This probably skewed my results somewhat because I definitely avoided opening emails I would normally look at, just so I didn’t have to track it.
• This week, I didn’t send a lot of emails, but that’s not very normal for me. I only worked 2 days this week, and I was only writing, not producing. On normal weeks, where I’m producing 3-4 days, I typically send a lot more emails. 

So, feel free to send me an email. If anything, this past week at least this proves I’ll answer you.