I haven’t really told you all that much about what I do here at Microsoft since I started doing it back in April of 2010. I’m a Program Manager at the company, and that means I’m not entirely sure I can tell you what I do. PMs are a notoriously superstitious lot and I’m worse than most about being tied down to a static description of my job – the modern equivalent of your mother’s advice to never make funny faces in a mirror; we all know how that ends.

What I can tell you is how I do what I do: Email.

A typical day greets me with between 100 and 200 emails, on average. That’s how much I receive. I tend to send out about 10% of that amount. At first glance, that doesn’t seem like very much, until you see what that adds up to in a work week: up to 1,000 emails received, and up to 100 drafted and sent, every five days.

Not everybody has the same numbers. Not everyone uses the same mechanisms. I know a PM around these parts that probably has as many IM conversations a day as I have mails – probably has half of them open at the same time, right now. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve seen his desktop.

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