Half-Life Inbox: A Realistic Way to Tackle E-mail
Far too often, you go on vacation or take a few hours away from your digital device to... well, live your life. Quietly, while you were away, your inbox exploded with hundreds of messages. Once you get back from relaxing, these unread emails harass you all week, just waiting to be answered.
At the beginning, it's easy to clean up messages (weekly newsletters, outdated notifications, conversations you are Cc-ed in). As you get closer to 0, simply archiving messages gets a little harder. You have emails you actually need to think about or that require you to do something, like pay a bill or (for me) redesign a website.
What you’ve never seen (left) vs. Something we find more useful (right)
We’ve all been trained to believe the utopian “Inbox Zero” is a good thing, but it's unrealistic. There's always a minimum amount of emails flowing in your inbox and it’s too distracting to clean them up as they come in.
To catch up, it helps setting smaller goals and deadlines.
That’s why we’re introducing a little tool we called Half-Life Inbox. It’s a tool created by our CTO based on the “exponential decay model” (yes, he is a physicist). The exponential decay model is typically used with radioactive materials. Larger material decays more quickly at first and then the decay slows down--just like email. Check out the Wikipedia chart to get a visual idea. Interestingly enough, the same half-life rules govern chemical reactions, electrostatics, fluid dynamics, geophysics, heat transfer, pharmacology and toxicology, and thermoelectricity. We are applying it to email.
Here’s how our Half-Life Inbox works. Input the number of emails you currently have, the number of emails you would like to have by your deadline and the number days you would like to take to reach your goal. Half-Life inbox uses the exponential decay model to map out the number of emails you need to get to by the end of each day until your deadline. You’ll be able to manage incoming emails as well, without feeling the pressure of a Zero inbox. (Our tool does not even provide an answer for getting to zero inbox, partly because of the good fortune that the exponential equation has no answer for zero.)
Not only does Half-Life refer to the scientific model, it refers to the feeling that we spend half our lives on answering e-mails. Let’s change that and make realistic productivity goals in 2014. Hopefully this little tool can help with that. Enjoy.