Hitting the Email Wall 5

It’s a New Year, and like many, I like to reflect on what I’ve done and what I plan to do, what I’ve done well and what I can do better.     Trust me that I have more important things to reflect on, but I did want to share this one on Email, which remains the primary method of communication in my world.   For me it’s more than anything on paper, SMS, Facebook Message, LinkedIn Request, or Twitter DM combined.  Times ten.  Here’s a graph to help demonstrate:

I picked Emails Sent for a few reasons – first I’m stuck in Outlook and it’s how I organize my offline PSTs, so it’s easy to see and compare my last 5 full years as a VC at First Round Capital.    But it’s also probably my truest measure of interaction, engagement, and time spent processing and responding to email.   The total number of inbound emails, with spam and important stuff and cc’s and bcc’s are certainly a lot and rising, but most of it gets read or filed away or deleted.  And it doesn’t include my personal email – I barely/rarely check that anymore.

So it’s kept growing, and for the last two years it’s been over 15,000 emails sent per year.   That’s 1,250 per month.  288 per week.   58 every day Monday through Friday.

I don’t think I can spend any more time on it, or send any more emails – I think I’ve hit the wall.   So my New Year’s Email resolution is to work smarter not harder, to focus on quality versus quantity, be more proactive than reactive, and overall to prioritize and manage it better.   Thanks to an event Sean Black of SalesCrunch put together, I met Getting Things Done master David Allen.  I had already read his earlier work, and just finished his latest book Making It All Work.  I hope to put it into practice in 2012 – wish me luck.