Building an Email Calculator: Part 2

A Podcast Series with Francis Wade of 2Time Labs

I recently had a series of podcast conversations with Francis Wade, a professional productivity practitioner on the topic of Email Overload. In this series we try to work through the key elements, and challenges, of building an Email Overload calculator. Here is the second episode of the three-part series. Listen in and let us know what you think!

Here in the second part of our series, we delve into the “formula” that would be at the heart of a sound Email health calculator.

It's no easy conversation to follow - you will probably need a paper and pencil!

In the discussion, we start to build out an Email health calculator that utilizes the following data points:

(total messages-unread messages-tagged messages) [more importance] "BlindSpot measure"
# read messages * (age in days -1) [more importance] "Morgue Measure"
# unread messages/ # incoming email per day [more importance] "Backlog Measure"
# threaded messages / # total messages [moderate importance]
# raw threaded messages [high importance]
# subscription email older than a day / # total messages older than a day [low importance]

We took a break for about a month, then reconvened to record the second part of this episode. During the discussion, we agreed on the following elements.

(total messages-unread messages-tagged messages) [more important]
# read non-subscribed messages * (age in days per message -1) [more important]
# read subscription messages * (age in days per message -1) [more important]
# incoming email per day / ((#unread subs--sqrd> + #unread nonsubsc) [more important]
# raw threaded messages - for non-subscribes using geometric growth [high importance]
# subscription email older than a day / # total messages older than a day [lower importance]

Listen to the episode and see if you can follow-along.. it’s quite a ride!

Episode 57 Building an Email Calculator with Michael Einstein: Part 2

Francis Wade is a productivity practitioner and consultant. His firm Framework Consulting, focuses on improving productivity, strategy, and corporate culture. He also manages 2Time Labs, a web site dedicated to productivity and time management research.

He has also recently published his second book, "Perfect Time Based Productivity". This book focuses on providing a comprehensive set of productivity-oriented skills and the tools to assess and develop them. What's more, it allows for individuals to customize these skills to meet their own, unique needs.