I did not expect such immediate results when I started tracking my email habits yesterday.

The knowledge that “it would be noted” stopped me from unconsciously opening up Gmail quite a few times. While I did hope that my motivations would not influence my actions (and thus the data), I’m not complaining about checking my email less.

Yesterday’s Stats

Here are my usage stats from yesterday:

• Checked email: 5 times
  • Habit: 3
  • Expecting message: 0
• First check: 08:33
• Last check: 22:43
• Frequency (Average): 03:18
• Total messages: 17
• Total Important messages: 0

This would probably consider this a “minimal” day of email usage. I basically checked my email each time I changed “modes” throughout the day– start of the day, mid-morning, after lunch, end of work, and just before turning off the computer at night.

I had the highest number of messages at the first check in the morning (10), while I had no more than 3 messages at any other time. The main takeaway here is that there is a minimum amount of time required to check my email due to some relatively unchanging conditions (opening browser, typing URL, loading Gmail, etc.). I suspect that the time spent each time I checked my inbox was rather similar despite the difference in new messages. Therefore, if I waited until I had more messages before loading Gmail, I could probably save some time.