This is an interesting post from the third day of someone’s attempt to maintain a Zero Inbox.
It’s quite a diligent effort, and I admire his use of tracking statistics to get some insights into what’s going on with all the email messages received in a day. It’s interesting that so few replies are generated, and so many are simply deleted.
I keep wishing that someone will create software to track these kinds of statistics, perhaps via add-ons in Outlook or Gmail. They’d surely give us more information on our habit patterns than we have now.
Thanks for connecting to our post about Inbox Zero. Love your thoughts about email metrics. At an enterprise level, it would be great for someone to develop a plugin to chart/network out how emails starting at the top of the organization get delegated, defered and deleted downstream. And who is the frequent initator of email “storms”. Also time spent in email vs. productivity. I’m positive we’d find bad email decisions often turn into viral cascades of follow-ups and wasted time. Another idea …. a countdown clock when opening email. That way you can process more efficiently and better track the time suck when determining how to process long complicated emails.