Day: January 18, 2013

My friend Michael Sliwinski (link) recently a post from Paris Lemon where the claim is that we probably write a novel worth of emails every year.
I believe this may be true.
The Good News is that if you query all those email you can publish your first novel.
The Bad News I don’t think anyone will like to read it.
I have been a big proponent to learn to type, I mentioned in my book 25 Tips for Productivity and I practice constantly, even that I probably type faster than the average, my goal is to type more than 100 words per minute.
I just want to let you with some numbers to reflect over the weekend, (especially for those that don’t need to learn, because they don’t type long enough)
It is consider a novel when a book is over 50,000 words. Let’s assume as Paris Lemon said that we type 50,000 words worth of email every year.
If you type:
15 words per minute you need 3,333.33 minutes (55.55 hours)
20 words per minute you need 2,500 minutes (41.66 hours)
40 words per minute you need 1,250 minutes (20.84 hours)
60 words per minute you need 833 minutes (13.89 hours)
84 words per minute you need 595.24 minutes (9.9 hours)
100 words per minute you need 500 minutes (8.33 hours)
Just imagine you can improve from 20 words per minute to 84 words per minute… You will suddenly found 31 hours this year. Instead of this, people will use in average 42 hours to write those emails and wonder how the people that type 84 words per minute can leave work earlier.

I tend to scan them and send them to Evernote to a folder for my kids files. How many times you have place the invitation in the door of the refrigerator just to be buried under the other hundred things you place in there. A much better practice is to take the minute that will take to make a picture of the invitation and add to the calendar the party information. At least Party on the Calendar. You know know where the invitation is, the guess work is done.

i.e. If you just take the picture, but don’t write it down in the calendar, you will forgot most likely. If you don’t have the two minute to finish the process, just dump it on your Inbox.