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...
Dear Professor,
ReplyDeleteYou are different from people who do not want to be disturbed.
vasan: Actually, the last sentence was meant to be ironic. I don't think anyone really enjoys getting thousands of e-mails each month!
ReplyDeleteKAUST comes with a huge load of emails. Though I have to say, for me, most of them are announcements that I couldn't care less about. 80% of the emails are not directed to me personally and and only third of the emails I get from KAUST are relevant.
ReplyDeleteBTW, do you still have that script? Do you mind sharing it?
Abdul, the script is in the next post, here: http://scienceinthesands.blogspot.com/2011/02/python-code-for-making-histogram-of.html. A reader published an extension of it here: https://gist.github.com/3613794
ReplyDelete.