The number is 33,370.
That is how many outbound emails left my two sending addresses last year — carl-gustav.oberg@bebetteronline.com and carl-gustav@mobilglas.se together. I did not set out to count them. I set out, on the first Tuesday back, to clean up a folder structure that had grown a few layers of bark over Christmas. The count fell out of that work.
I have been sitting with the number for two days. I am not sure I have processed it yet, but I want to write while it is still uncomfortable, because I think the discomfort is the useful part.
What 33,370 means in practice
Spread across the working year, it is something like ninety-one messages a day. If the average outbound takes ninety seconds to write — and that is generous to me, because a fair share of what I write needs revising — the number says I spent roughly eleven hours a week last year writing email. Just writing. Not reading. Not deciding what to write about. Not following up the threads that needed a second pass.
There is a version of this where I would post the number with some pride. The version where eleven hours of email a week looks like throughput, and throughput looks like the business working. I half-believed that version of myself in 2011. I do not believe it now, but I want to write down why honestly, because the change is recent and I have not had time to varnish it.
Where it came from
Two businesses in parallel will produce email. Two businesses in parallel where the founder is also the senior account person on the four or five most demanding accounts will produce a lot of email. Add a couple of one-off consulting engagements, where I am the only person in the chain, and the volume compounds.
The breakdown, approximately:
- BBO retainer client work: maybe a third. Most of it is internal — passing context to the team, signing off on deliverables, the long thread before a strategy switch. Some of it is the client-facing letter that nobody else in the firm could quite write yet.
- Mobilglas operational and vendor email: another good chunk. The supplier coordination, the franchise-style operator conversations, the recurring questions about pricing and stock.
- Consulting engagements: small in count, heavy in length. The ones where I am the only person in the conversation are the ones where every reply has to be properly written.
- Internal across the two companies: the rest. Hires, finance, the small operational dramas, the running argument with myself about which of the two companies should be paying for which thing.
If I add the time I spent reading and triaging the inbound side, the eleven-hours-a-week number becomes substantially worse. I will not estimate that here. I do not want to know.
The Tuesday-Friday discipline did not save me
A year and a half ago I wrote a post called Why I check email only on Tuesdays and Fridays. The discipline was, and is, real. I genuinely did not open the client mailbox on Mondays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays for most of 2011. The autoresponder ran. People adapted. The world did not end.
The volume kept growing anyway.
The mistake in the original post — the one I would not have spotted in 2011 — is that batching is a treatment for the cost of interruption. It is not a treatment for the cost of volume. If the business produces ninety-one outbound messages a day, you can pile them all into Tuesday and Friday and you still wrote ninety-one messages. The cognitive load of the writing did not move. The context-switching cost between accounts did not move. The “we’ll get back to you tomorrow morning” promise that goes out at 22:30 because the day has already eaten itself — that did not move either.
I have been telling myself the discipline was working because the inbox was less intrusive. The inbox is downstream of the work. Volume is upstream. I was treating the symptom.
What I think it actually costs
The honest answer is I do not know yet. I can list the candidates, though.
It costs attention. Eleven hours a week of writing email is eleven hours a week not spent on the work email is supposed to be in service of — the pricing decision, the hire, the partnership conversation, the patient reading of one long client document instead of three short ones.
It costs depth on the things that do get written. A response written in the seventh hour of writing-email is not the same response as one written in the second hour. I can feel myself shortening. The shortening is sometimes correct — most responses should be shorter than I want them to be — and sometimes wrong, because the shortening happens on the thread that genuinely needed five paragraphs and a question back.
It costs the things that never got written at all. Every founder I know has a stack of half-thought-through emails to old colleagues, prospective partners, people whose work I admire. Those are the ones that lose the volume fight first. They are also, I suspect, the ones that compound.
It costs an argument with myself about whether the business is set up correctly. Ninety-one emails a day is what one person can produce if that person is willing to be inside email most of their working hours. It is not a number a founder produces because the business chose it. It is a number that emerges when the business has not yet sorted out who else can write what.
What I think I do about it in 2013
The honest answer is: hire more, and let go of more. Both halves matter and the second half is harder.
There are messages in this 33,370 that nobody else in either business could have written. Most of those are board-adjacent, owner-level, partnership-grade, or the few clients whose relationship genuinely is with me personally rather than with the firm. That set is much smaller than the running total suggests. Maybe a tenth of the volume. Maybe less.
The rest is a delegation question I have been deferring. There are senior people inside BBO who could draft the long client letter; my job would be to read and sign. There is a coordinator role at Mobilglas that does not exist yet but should — most of the supplier and operator email is process, not judgment. There are consulting engagements I should either staff up around or stop taking on as solo work.
The discipline I wrote about in 2011 was about protecting attention against an interrupting inbox. The discipline I think I need in 2013 is about protecting the business from being shaped by what one person’s typing-hours allow. Those are different problems. They look similar from inside the working day.
What I’d like to know
I do not know if anybody else has counted theirs honestly. I would not have, if the folder cleanup had not handed me the number sideways. If you run two things at once, or one thing where you are the senior voice on most of the accounts, what is the volume? And — separately, more interestingly — what is the smallest version of you that could still keep the business yours? Hit me back. I’d be curious to compare.