Occasional Observations

What's really in my mailbox, and who's sending it? How many mails do I get per day and how good am I at managing email? Since I have had the feeling for a year or more that email has taken over my life, I downloaded Xobni, a nifty plug-in for Outlook, to find out more.

It's now more than a month since I installed Xobni, which offers "email organization, search and navigation", and that's been long enough for the Xobni Analytics to produce some interesting statistics.

To share some of the more interesting ones:

• I'm getting more than 120 mails a day, weekdays
• Overnight I've usually received 40 to 60 mails
• From 9am through to around 10pm I get a steady flow of between 8-10 mails an hour
• The peak day for receiving mails is Wednesday
• I'm most likely to respond fastest to an email received between midday and 1pm
• Send me a mail at 4am and it could take me up to five days to respond
• I'm sending about a third the number of mails I receive
  

You might ask: How has Xobni helped manage email so far? In short, it is starting to help: I've identified the people who email me the most (you know who you are!) and although this might sound like stating the bleeding obvious, this is a useful first step. One person in my top 10 has already taken action - he took a week off work, and of course his position in the table has dropped.

Although the analytics are useful to a point, they're far from perfect - Xobni doesn't seem to index mails that I delete immediately after receiving. I'd like to see greater accuracy in the analytics, but for now, for a free tool that's still Beta, it's a good start.

Labels: search, tech