Why I’m bad at email
I asked an LLM to look through a month of email and categorize it. Starting with 1,701 emails in my primary inboxes, here are the substantive work-related ones.
| Category | Existing stuff | New inbounds |
|---|---|---|
| Research projects and collaborations | 48 | — |
| Funding and research infrastructure | 5 | — |
| Students, mentoring and recommendation letters | 12 | 98 |
| Talks, events and contributions | 4 | 22 |
| Peer review and institutional service | 4 | 28 |
| Professional engagements and conversations | 11 | 8 |
| Administration and compliance | 9 | — |
| Payments and reimbursements | 7 | — |
| Personal follow-ups | 9 | — |
| Total | 109 | 156 |
At 10–15 minutes each to read a CV and send a thoughtful reply, the 95 student and research inquiries alone would take 16–24 hours. Giving all 21 talks at an hour each and reviewing all 14 papers at 2–4 hours each would add another 49–77 hours, before talk preparation or travel.
What’s hard about this is that there are so many great emails that I never get to respond to because I have to deliver on things I’m already committed to. I feel bad about my inbox pretty much every day and it stresses me out.