My inbox has now been reduced to only 2 messages — and one is from my wife reminding me to tape Boston Public this evening while she is away visiting friends in Seattle. Only 2 messages is pretty impressive.

We discussed this issue recently in my Operations Management course in terms of bottlenecks and work flow. Like me, most students work to maintain no more than 10-15 e-mails in their inbox. There seemed to be two more groups beyond that — students who kept no more than 50 and then student who maintained 150+. I personally can’t imagine having an inbox with 150+ messages, but it seems that some people handle it without a problem. In addition, most students in my class use their inbox as a quasi-task list by keeping track of action items through e-mail (foregoing the Tasks feature in Outlook for example).

A quick google search on “average number of emails inbox” revealed that others have asked the same question and even come up with a few results. This doesn’t even begin to address related issues like rules used to manage and sort, number of emails daily, amount of spam, etc., but it is interesting . . .