If email effectiveness were a stat, like a baseball batting average, what would your average be?

Before I lose both baseball fans and email fans, hear me out. Batting average is a simple stat (too simple for hardcore baseball fans), but it highlights that even good hitters fail nearly 70% of the time. Hitting .300  is a benchmark for a good hitter. (For the international readers among you, it’s called ‘batting average’ despite the fact that it’s expressed as a percentage and discussed as if it’s a number in the hundreds. That’s baseball for you. )

I am an outright fan-boy of David Allen. I read his books, practice GTD, listen to video and audio. I even plunk down money on his website and buy stuff.  Recently, I read one of his posts/emails and was struck by the simplicity of one of his points.

I can’t say it better than him so here:

Q: How much time do I need to get my email inbox to zero?

A: For people who have 50+ emails a day, I've noticed that it takes an average of about 30 seconds each to process (decide what it is, delete it, file it, respond to it quickly, or defer it to an "action" folder or list.) For someone with 100 emails a day (more and more common) that's 50 minutes just to get through a day's email load. That doesn't count all of the other input you get as well, including phone calls, voice mails, conversations, and meetings.

A typical professional these days must factor in at least an hour a day and an additional hour at the end of the week (for a Weekly Review.) And not as "It would be nice if I could..."—but as an absolute requirement to manage their life and work with integrity.

Most people I work with actually boast about how much email they get. I don’t really know, but 100 a day sounds like a lowish number for my cohort. When I think that it takes only 120 emails a day before losing an hour from a day to processing email, it sounds bad.

If you spend less time than 30 seconds on an email, does your email batting average go up or down? I would say down. You were essentially ineffective, weren’t you. As a thought experiment, what about your perspective would change knowing in advance that you would spend 2 hours a day doing nothing but processing email?

For me, it would mean that I would know that I have to carve out time from what I consider "productivity.” I don’t hate email, which is the impression I get from some of my work buddies. However, I am cutthroat about email and that also bewilders or infuriates some of my workmates. But somehow, intuitively and from experience (and maybe those are the same thing), I know that I have to cheat some emails out of 20 seconds to give others more than 30. I want to go home with nearly zero items in my in-box. That fact alone buts me on the outside looking in with my peers.

I’m sure that most people I work with would report that they are better than average email hitters. If you do the math, how does it look?

Look at how many emails per week and divide by 7 (or 5 depending your weekend devotion to email)  to get more averaged idea of how many on emails per day. Then multiply by 0.5 to get the number of minutes day it takes to process email.

Would you say you spend this more than 30 seconds? or less? Does this make you a better hitter or a worse hitter?

Generally, I would say if you are below that 30 second number your batting average goes down. By same logic, I would say that most email handling rules are mostly bad. You are deferring processing for no good reason. The only rule I can imagine is good is a rule that trashes emails that you never want to read. (Dirty secret – I do this.) And, I read very few “interesting” or FYI email for the reason that I don’t want to spend more time on email.

Thanks yet again to David Allen for putting something I take for granted in an unusual, thought-provoking light.

Full disclosure – I’ve always wanted to use the word cohort in blog.