I recently learned that Google has an account activity summary, which neatly summarizes your usage of their various products (email, youtube, etc etc).

This is what came up for my email:

I tend not to work on Fridays (they are my reading days), and I really try to skip Saturdays and Sundays. If we equate the 3 of them as one day, 1190 emails over 4 weeks equals 59.5 emails/day outgoing and 72.85 emails/day incoming.

I write 60 emails a day (and these are all for my @examine email, not my other stuff)

This isn’t a humblebrag, but it’s some real life numbers that success does not happen overnight. My friends have long nicknamed me “Relentless Sol,” and my email frequency shows why. I’m not chasing one big success, I’m chasing 25 little-wins.

Still, I’m not suggesting you try to chew off more than you can handle. I’m simply saying that people get so infatuated with getting a big break (be it getting mentioned in a mainstream magazine, getting tweeted by a quasi-celebrity, getting a link from a popular blog) that they lose sight of the big picture: success is incremental, not an overnight explosion.

I know it’s cool to “prioritize” your email these days, to talk about how using the phone is superior, to disconnect. I’ve taken the opposite tack – I answer any and all emails promptly, I keep my inbox zero, and in the hours I do work (roughly 5 hours a day), I go full throttle.

I also invest heavily in courses and specific coaching, but that’s for another day.

Your mileage may vary.