#noemail

Earlier on this blog, I wrote a piece about the cost of #noemail. A personal cost really a library fine. Now, Erica Douglass of erica.biz has written a kind of answer to that article within her chronicle: My 30-Day No Email Trial: The Results.

Erica goes about her #noemail experiment methodically and with some interesting assistance from some commercial software including her virtual, but part-time human, assistant, Susan. Susan is a nice touch, a custom autoresponder and junk mail deleter and summarizer of messages.

Overall, Erica — who is afterall running a consulting and speaking service — was able to save money by not doing email. She figures the profits this way:

First the cost of Susan: Susan spends about an hour a week on my email, so that’s a bit over $60/month in direct costs to me.

Next the profits as measured by RescueTime:

I went from spending 1-2 hours a day on email to 3-5 hours a week. That’s a savings of approximately 5 hours a week. At my consulting rate of $500/hour, that’s a $10,000/month savings.

Of course, not every hour I saved could be billed out at $500. But even if every hour I save is worth $50 (and I think that’s a fair assumption), I saved $1,000/month

Okay, so somewhere between $1K and $10K per month in savings as measure only during the one month of June/July. That’s a very broad somewhere across a very specific time frame. I would definitely question those results if submitted to me as a research paper by a student. Nonetheless, this isn’t a research paper as much as a personal testimony by someone who is putting her business on the line. That’s the power of Erica’s experiment. And the results when seen in that context are very promising.

As Erica says:

In other words, unchaining myself from email massively benefited me in terms of both having more time and having a better emotional state (which is, frankly, priceless.) I don’t hate waking up and getting on the computer any more. That’s huge.

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