Greg's mail queue

I receive about 2,000 mail messages a day, and I spend a lot of my time reading and replying to mail, and often deleting mail unseen. Nevertheless, it keeps me busy, and when I'm busy doing other things, the mail queue grows. It's reasonable, therefore, to assume that my mail queue is a rough indicator of the amount of work I have. As a result, I keep a graph of the size of my inbox and the number of messages in it. Click on the graphs for a 1600x1200 version.

This isn't perfect, of course. Apart from the fact that one big Microsoft “Word” document can still alter the size markedly, bike sheds and such can also influence it. In addition, when I'm travelling, I take my mail with me, so this will only show the amount of mail I haven't yet picked up. You can see the results in that portion of the graph between 8 and 22 May 2005: the graph bottoms out when I collect the remaining mail, while normally it approaches 0 once a day, but never quite makes it. This is best seen in the high-resolution version of the raw graph.

You'll also note that the count goes up sharply at weekends. I do read my mail at the weekend, but I don't weed out the uninteresting messages until Monday.

Greg's diary	Greg's photos	Greg's links	Greg's home page

	$Id: mailcount.html,v 1.9 2008/02/10 23:52:09 grog Exp $