89

89. That's my final count. That's the number of separate people I have communicated with today.

• 3 mobile phone calls
• 6 Texts
• 2 Skype voice chat
• 1 Skype text conversation
• 11 on Instant Messenger
• 8 people on Twitter
• 21 e-mails
• 7 in a forum
• 11 on Triiibes
• 13 separate blog comments
• 4 Facebook messages
• 1 Suspect Washing Machine Repairman
• 1 Unimpressed girlfriend

This is a conservative tally. It neglects people who read my blog, or follow me on Twitter, but didn't share a unique communication with me today. It's also a lower number than usual, I didn't leave the house today. I really have no idea if 89 is a high number or a low number? What would you guess your interactions to be?

Here are my key points:

• Over the 13 hours I kept this tally, I communicated with close to 7 people an hour. That's more than 1 every ten minutes. How do we get things done?
• I recalled the key points of all these communications without writing them down. I think our memory is getting better at filtering out the small talk and plucking out the key points
• Only 8% were real-time voice chats. Will my generation lose the ability to talk in person?
• Distractions. There are too many of them. We need to be better at saying “we're too busy to talk”. More than that, we need to be accepting “too busy to talk” without offense.
• My girlfriend, an architect at site meetings most of the day, just guessed 19 for the day. Clearly there's a big gap here. Where do you fit in?
• If I had a message I wanted to get out to as many people as possible. I could do it well. If I had a more complicated message to get out, demanding more attention and real-time communication, it might be more tricky.

Comments

[Sebastian]

89... What does this say about our generation? Are you that far out from the statistical mean?

Thinking about it, I haven't kept an exact count but in the last 3-4 hours I've communicated with around 25 people... so you're not that far from the median, unless I am as well.