Fascinating Statistics about Your Gmail, Google Mail Habits, Stats, and More

Gmail Meter is pretty slick as it has provided me a perspective of what my life looks like in a way I never have been able to really calculate.

What Gmail Meter does is simply show you the statistics around your emailing activity – anything from volume to response time to categorization and even email length in terms of responses.

Wow! It was incredibly insightful. Here’s what September looked like for me (only one email account) in a snapshot – although it’s worth noting that I manage 4 very active email accounts and so this is just about 25% of what really comes in – I’m doing some reporting on the other email accounts as well to get a full view of what’s really happening, but I imagine that I get 3 to 4 times what this report says here.

Yikes!

Total volume for one of my email accounts

As you can see, I rarely ever star any of my emails – this is because I typically am able to have an answer or solution prepped quickly without having any particular email stand-out as more important than any other email.

My system is quite simple as it’s somewhat condensed and customized version of Inbox Zero – my goal is to head to bed with zero email conversations that require my attention, not necessarily have no emails in my inbox, although that is always a nice thing to have!

You’ll see this as to how many I have in my “Inbox” in another graph shortly.

Some Daily, Weekly, and Monthly stats:

Daily Traffic

Weekly Traffic

Monthly Traffic

One interesting thing of note for me is that I don’t keep many of the things that I email about – in fact, my goal to a certain degree, is to reduce the clutter globally as best as I can. This means that I’m much more willing to simply trash a conversation instead of archiving it.

This very interesting distribution shows some of that behavior as 25% of all emails eventually head to the trash bin while 60% go into labels or archives (effectively the same thing).

I know some people who keep nearly everything… bleh!

Email Categories

Here are some very interesting stats that hide a bit of my method though…

Thread Length Distribution

Time Before First Response

This above graph is interesting because I simply do not have a problem not answering some emails that come through into my inbox. In fact, I get a lot of emails that don’t have any real value or are not really asking to be answered. So those instantly get thrown into the trash-bin.

I wish it was able to deep-dive into that a bit more because it would show how I respond very quickly to most “real” emails.

Huh.

Word Count

This shouldn’t surprise many of you since I typically respond with very short sentences or a combination of a few words to many emails.

It is what it is.

I’m going to be thinking about this more and how it reflects the way I manage email. Thoughts on this? Love to hear your perspective and whether reality matches your perception!