Thats right, over the last 10 work days I've averaged about two and a half hours a day doing email. I've measured it.

Now, I am getting lots of stuff done - these emails are important and its been very productive overall. Quite a large part of what I am doing these days is building relationships and getting more people involved in specific communities. And doing some of this over email is handy : everyone has it, an audit trail and conversation tracking comes free, its available everywhere and best of all it accepted to be an async means of communication.

Is there a usable alternative to email here ? I looked and failed to find anything.

Worth keeping in mind that I say email to include personal emails as well as mailing lists. I didnt track it to that level of detail, but I'd guess about 70% of that time is spent on non mailing lists emails.

- KB