A couple of years ago, I was asked by one of the organisations I work with to do an “email audit” – “audit” in the accounting rather than quality sense – looking at how many emails I receive, and what I do with them. That specific project was trying derive what aspects of an email could be tweaked to encourage action, but I found it a useful experience to work out how efficiently I used email.

Every now and again I repeat the process, looking at the emails I receive in a typical week and what I do with them. Sometimes, this spurs action: unsubscribing from newsletters I never read, for example, or resolving to check email less frequently. Since I’ve just done one of these, from 22nd – 28th September, I thought that it might be interesting to share the results on here. I’ve really no idea where I sit in the continuum email recipients in a job like mine, and maybe this will encourage people to share.

So, some figures: over the week in question, which I’ve no reason to suspect was atypical, I received 1,010 emails across all my accounts. I haven’t included anything that my email providers marked as spam. These divided roughly 60% were personal – as in, not related to my main job in Public Health. That’s probably an overestimate, because I wasn’t very good at classifying emails, and tried to err consistently on the side of calling things “personal” rather than “work”.

I divided my actions into three mutually exclusive categories:

1. Deleted without reading – These were emails that I either didn’t open (if using Gmail), or that I deleted at a glance if they happened to be opened in Outlook’s preview pane.
2. Read – These were emails that I read and then deleted or archived. This category covers a multitude of sins, from those emails that I read and realised were nonsense, to those that I read closely as they included important information, but were ultimately not “actionable”.
3. Read and acted – There were emails that I read and acted upon. Again, this covers a wide gamut of stuff, including emails in which I simply clicked on a link, emails I replied to, and emails which kicked off whole streams of work.

This pie chart shows how the proportions stacked up:

These varied slightly by the type of email: I read about 10% more of my work email than my personal email, but acted on 2% more personal mail. All told, I deleted about 62% of my work email and 69% of my personal email without reading it. Which is, I think, an appropriate response to receiving 1,010 emails.

So what does all of this mean? I’ve no idea. I don’t even know whether it means that email is a horrendously inefficient or wonderfully efficient communication method. With email, I can cut through ~65% of the things that don’t interest me in virtually no time; if these were letters or phone calls, I’d have no time to do any work. But, on the other hand, if email were unavailable, how many of these messages would ever bother transforming themselves into other media? Do I just get a load of emails because sending an email is relatively “costless” in terms of money, time, and energy? I certainly don’t feel like I’m drowning in email, and was a little surprised that the totals were so high – about 25% higher than the previous times I’ve done this. Having said that, I have come to rely on Gmail’s “Priority Inbox” feature more than I ever thought I would.

Compared with the first time I did this exercise, the proportion of emails that I’ve deleted without reading has fallen considerably. I don’t remember the exact figures, but they were somewhere near 80%. That shows the effect of the remedial action I’ve taken, I suppose.

Anyway, I’ve no idea if this is of interest to anyone, but I find it a useful exercise, and wonder if you might too? Feel free to comment if you’ve any thoughts to contribute!

Tyne Tees is one of the few areas of the UK where Ceefax is still available… but not for much longer! In 12 days, this region will complete digital switchover and we’ll lose Ceefax forever.

The degree to which this really doesn’t matter to me personally is exemplified by the fact that it’s taken me about 10 minutes to work out how to get it on my current TV…! But I used to use it quite a lot, so I feel a little bit sad to know that it will no longer be there!

It fundamentally changes what it means to go on holiday.

It seems it’s a day for hilarious quotes today: following on from this that I spotted a couple of hours ago, this ludicrous bit of hyperbole from Daniel Danker also made me laugh out loud. If, for you, being able to download BBC TV programmes to your iPhone or iPad genuinely changes what it means to go on holiday… well, I doubt we’d get on very well.

Alan Turing is a fascinating subject for a biography: A leader in the fields of logical mathematics and computing, a war hero of a very different kind, and a social misfit. There’s so much to explore, and so much to learn. Yet, before turning to this definitive volume, I hadn’t read a proper biography of the man – although given the size of his standing in our cultural, intellectual and scientific past, I had a fairly good knowledge of many of the key moments in his story.

This comprehensive biography is certainly detailed. It is, perhaps, the most thorough biography I’ve read. This allows a great insight into the character and intelligence of Turing, but it did quickly become unnecessarily dense in parts, and felt like it was veering off at a tangent by placing Turing’s academic work in a wider context than was really necessary. I don’t think the book needed to explain some of the mathematical concepts in quite the detail it did, nor did it need to explain in fine detail the sequelae of those concepts as discovered by others.

I was also a little uncomfortable with the degree of subjectiveness in this description of his life. Clearly, it is impossible for any biography to be written from a totally objective stand-point, but it is clear that Hodges stands in awe of Turing, and constantly tries to explain and justify anything that could be seen as a fault in him. There were times when motives and opinions seemed to have been assigned to Turing’s actions without a clear explanation given as to how Hodges had derived these, which made me question their veracity. I’m also awed of Turing and think he’s a giant of our age, but even I found the warmth, bordering on sycophancy, of this book a little overbearing. I think the point would have actually been made more strongly had the reader been left to draw their own conclusions from a more objective description of the events.

I was disappointed with some of the omissions of this book. Turing was clearly a man with a strong sense of morality and ethics, and yet cryptography – perhaps his best-known skill – has inherent within it the ethical complexity of choosing when to act on intelligence, and when to ignore it and effectively sacrifice people in order to maintain the illusion that the code has not been broken. This, to me, is one of the most profoundly interesting parts of the work completed at Bletchley, and of cryptography, yet this is given relatively short shrift in this biography. I feel sure that Turing would have reflected on this point, and probably had interesting things to say about it, so it seems a shame that they aren’t discussed here. Perhaps this reflects a wider criticism of the book – it’s difficult at times to pick out Turing’s character amongst the reams of detailed mathematical and computational theory. That said, I think the story and an impression of the character of Turing does manage to shine through over the course of the book as a whole, even if it is hard-going in parts.

It’s really difficult to give this book a star-rating, because there are passages of five-star descriptive biographical brilliance, and passages of five-star mathematical or computational explanation, but the two cannot really happily co-exist in one volume. For a general reader like me, it leads to passages of tedium; the opposite passages would probably have the same effect for someone reading for the theory.

My head says, therefore, that this is a three-star read; but my heart, perhaps more because of the piquancy of the tale, says it’s a four-star read. So I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

Alan Turing: The Enigma is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback, and also a special Centenary edition. There’s no Kindle edition available, which may well have frustrated Alan if he were alive today, and is really inexcusable when a new edition has only just been published.

I’ve mentioned on here previously that I’m a massive fan of Evernote, and ScanDrop is the main method by which I get paper stuff into my Evernote account. It’s another program which is brilliant for the fact that it just works. It scans and uploads directly to Evernote. I can specify which notebook I want the resulting note to appear in; I can tag them appropriately; I can even use the software to upload to other cloud services, or just save to my desktop.

ScanDrop doesn’t do anything that I can’t do manually. I could use my scanner’s proprietary software, or even OSX’s Image Capture, and then upload manually. But ScanDrop is an all-in-one solution that just makes life easier.

ScanDrop has a free version available, and works on Windows or Mac. Give it a go!

A little later this morning, I’ll be publishing the tenth and final review in a successful series of posts about my favourite Mac apps.

From next week, Wednesday mornings will feature book reviews: some original, some I’ve published elsewhere, and some a combination of the two. This series will continue pretty much indefinitely (read: until I get bored of it). I’ve even created a brand new skeuomorphic post template for this series, so you won’t want to miss that!

Autograph is an example of an app that does only one thing, but does it brilliantly. All Autograph does is allows me to sign things on my computer. A simple press of a universal shortcut causes a window to pop up, inviting me to sign my trackpad. I sign the trackpad, press return, and the signature is inserted into whatever I’m working on.

That is all it does. There are other, less elegant, solutions to this problem. I could have a scanned and stored JPG of my signature which I would import into a document as and when needed. But this solution is so simple and so elegant that it’s worth the couple of quid the app costs.

Check out their website, and see if you wouldn’t find a use for Autograph. I really recommend it.

I don’t understand why Kuvva isn’t more popular. It’s brilliant, simple and free: what more could anybody want?

Each week, Kuvva get an artist to design a series of desktop wallpapers. The free app then changes the desktop wallpaper to a new design each day. Over the course of a week, the wallpapers are all from a single artist, usually in a single style. Then, the following week, it’s a new artist and a new style. Sometimes it’s photography, sometimes it’s digital art, sometimes it’s hand-drawn. It’s a really brilliant idea, and it’s totally free.

Occasionally, the art is bizarre enough for me not to want to display it at work, but there is a function to designate “favourite” artists, and have only their work appearing.

Overall, Kuvva is brilliant, free, and available for Windows and Mac. What are you waiting for?

I’m a fairly recent convert to extensive bookmarking. Despite doing an awful lot of stuff online, I’ve survived most of my time with about 30 bookmarks in my bookmarks bar. Up until recently, I considered bookmarks as quick-access links to commonly used sites.

It’s only relatively recently that I got frustrated with losing sites that I didn’t use all that frequently, but wanted to refer to from time to time. And so, after reading about it on the Guardian site, I tried using Pinboard to allow me to store and search through far more bookmarks. This cleared some of the less frequently used ones from my bookmarks bar, which was appreciated, and meant that I got much better at bookmarking any site that I thought I might want to refer back to in future.

Pinboard has a bookmarklet system which allows you to add new items, but Delibar takes this to the next level. Delibar sits in the menubar, and gives me instant, searchable access to all my bookmarks. It also installs a (customisable) universal shortcut which allows me to bookmark any page in mere moments.

It’s a very, very simple app, but one that does it’s job perfectly. It also works with delicious, but I’ve never felt able to get on very well with that particular service, so can’t really comment on how well that works.

Delibar and Pinboard have revolutionised the way I bookmark, and they might do the same for you. Give them a go!

Since I use and love Evernote and Dropbox, you might wonder what possible use I can get out of Droplr. After all, all three apps store things in the cloud, and all three apps have sharing features.

The thing I love about Droplr is its pure speed and simplicity. It doesn’t do anything that Evernote and Dropbox can’t do, it just does it more gracefully. Essentially, if I want to share something – be that a file, a URL, or just a chunk of text – I drag it to the Droplr icon in my menubar. That automatically uploads it to Droplr and sticks a short URL on my clipboard. So, to send that last sentence to Droplr, I simply dragged it to the icon, and it generated this URL: http://go.sjh.im/IsGt. A simple Cmd-V then inserted it into this post. That’s just two actions: drag it to the icon and paste.

It’s that simplicity that I love about Droplr. And it’s free. So why not give it a go?