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Monday Jul 10, 2006

Email traffic vs. Distributed teams

Back from vacation (this is for another full story, I'll write about it if I have some time ;O) ), I had to clean my email inboxes and folders somewhat (you know it - DEL is a powerful key on the keyboard ;O)).
However, doing the cleanup, I looked into my 'Sent' folder as well. I was surprised. Really. I sent 1808 email messages (!) from January 20 and July 1st (2006), which is less than 6 months (vacations, holidays included). And, it's just plain work email, no personal stuff or other web activities included (bug tracking, ICQ, ...) .

It really made me to step back and think about it a little. I always was against a huge number of email. But, working in a distributed team across different timezones (and I guess there's no better example of distributed team as WSIT), there's no other way to break the distance or to influence something. The word 'communication' is the most important part when working in distributed teams. Especially when you have to communicate with experts in different fields located in different timezones, or get them together to solve some higher problem.

Posted at 03:00PM Jul 10, 2006 by mgrebac in root  |  Comments[4]

Comments:

1800 messages in half a year, that's "only" :) 10 messages per day. That's roughly one per hour, not too excessive ......

Posted by Willem on July 10, 2006 at 06:06 PM CEST #

Sure, that's fair to say. It's hard to measure as well ... the reason why it really impressed me ;O) was that I somewhat underestimated impact of email administration on the schedules and so on ... my messages are usually longer, and there's other work to do than just write emails (read them, e.g ;O) - reading an responding to a deep technical emails is not a job for 1 minute). I need to write some code, attend calls, ~1 month of vacation/holidays/days off not counted as well. In the schedules, one needs to account for the 'invisible' work he does as well, so I hope this little personal surprise will make me more accurate ;O).

Posted by Martin Grebac on July 12, 2006 at 10:33 AM CEST #

Hi Martin... I've already sent 12 messages, and it is just 7:53 am my time... :-) [or maybe it should be :-(]?

Posted by Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart on July 18, 2006 at 04:52 PM CEST #

Well, you wouldn't believe me, but I've been thinking about you while writing the 'email' blog entry ;O) I don't meet you very often, but EVERYTIME I saw you, you were sitting behind a computer and typing something into an email client, no matter if it's a J1 keynote, or your office, Prague office, ordinary morning, or ordinary evening, with one exception - when you have a presentation or speak somewhere, you don't type ;O). So I wondered what would be your number, and I was pretty sure I will not be able to beat you (and I guess I wouldn't want to as well ;O)) )

Posted by Martin Grebac on July 18, 2006 at 05:03 PM CEST #

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