The other day I happened to notice that I had received well over 100 e-mails in one day. While that may or may not seem high to you, in my case this meant that I spent most of the day handling e-mails, since the majority of these actually required a response or some other action on my part (I'm organizing two workshops right now, which accounts for much of the traffic).
I thought back to grad school days when I might or might not receive any e-mail on a given day. When did it all get so crazy? I decided it would be fun to find out. A bit of searching turned up the Python package imaplib, which allowed me to download headers for all messages (ever!) from my Gmail account. Then it was just a matter of extracting and reformatting the dates and plotting up a histogram with matplotlib. Here's the result:
Can you tell when I graduated and started working for KAUST? In the last few months prior to starting at KAUST, I got an average of about 250 messages a month. Within 2 months of starting at KAUST, that average was well over 1000, with some months substantially higher. Ah, the joys of being a professor...
