Everybody loves a bit of data analysis, right? On the 25th of March, the day after TEDxImperialCollege, I moved over 3500 emails out of my main inbox and into a folder. Why hadn’t I been keeping my emails organised anyway, you might ask. Well, for the same reason that my bedroom floor is covered in paper, useless wires, and old dirty socks…

I downloaded all my TEDxImperialCollege emails and made a histogram showing the number of emails per day. As you can see below, it all starts at the beginning of October 2011, with a Facebook message from Rudy Benfredj (nb: Facebook messages aren’t included in the count, his message is merely illustrative. Also these are only emails I received in my personal inbox.)

By mid-November, license-holder Gilead Amit had come on board. As a TED Global attendee, having Gilead lead the operation allowed us to do an event with over 100 people. None of us thought at the time that we’d end up having 700 people pack out the Great Hall.

At the beginning of February, we started publicising the event and the number of emails per day really started to skyrocket. By the time that tickets went on sale at the start of March, I was getting almost 50 emails a day, on average. I’m sure the rest of the committee were experiencing something similar; I was probably sending them about 50 emails every day!

On Wednesday 21st of March, three days before the event, I received 135 emails about TEDxImperialCollege. Lord knows how I made it through that day…

On a final note, I like to think that I’m good at keeping up with emails. But, to my horror, there were 7 that slipped through the net; who knows what they might have been about… (I’m certainly not checking!)