SaneBox, my latest venture, shipped activity reports this week.  These reports have a chart showing your email traffic and your email processing for the week.

Here is my activity chart for the week of 11/8/2010 and some thoughts about how to interpret the data:

I received 607 emails and ONLY 508 were important. SaneBox estimated that I saved 49 minutes because I didn’t have to search past the unimportant stuff.

My account is set up so that my unimportant emails are automatically filed into my @SaneLater folder.  So my SaneBox and my Inbox are the same.

The light grey shape in the background is the size of my Inbox.  The purple dotted line is the number of Inbox emails I process at any odd time (file,archive,delete). The yellow line is the number of Inbox emails I receive. So you should see the grey shape retreat when my purple dotted line increases faster than my yellow line.

The red line is the number of very important emails (@SaneTop) I receive.  @SaneTop is a subset of @SaneBox. The black dotted line is the number of @SaneTop emails I process at any odd time (file,archive,delete).  I should be processing these emails faster than any others.  You can see that I’m not.  Which is something I should work on.  I’m obviously letting very important emails sit while I process other less important stuff.  If you are guilty of the same thing, you might want to “show” @SaneTop on your settings page.

If I am using SaneBox properly, then my brown line, the number of unimportant emails I process, should look like a clearly defined step function.  Email is shiny.  But, I have more important things to do all day long than process unimportant mail.  So you should see me process that queue once a day and then leave it alone. 

The time I free up by not paying attention to unimportant email all the time should be shown in my ability to keep my Inbox small which is indicated by the stars.  We give out a star any time an Inbox gets below 50 (1 page) in a particular day.

We indicate at what point each day I am most concentrated on email.  You can see that mine is never the same each day - which hopefully means that I am being opportunistic.  The other possibility is that each day is pretty full with lots of surprises so I make room for email when I can. On the weekends, you see my activity is pretty early in the morning which gives you a sense of when my 5yo and 3yo get up.

Is my processing of 607 emails in a week impressive.  Actually no.  It is a little above average for SaneBox users. The trick is to do it while getting everything else done too.