Miker v. Inbox, Episode x Thousand
The last few weeks I’ve been operating at less than full capacity. In particular, while I heal up I’ve had to sleep a lot more than I normally do. The result was just under three thousand messages in my email inbox as of midnight last night. Seems like the email backup happens about once a month or so these days. This time it just got even worse than normal. So I bit the bullet and just dug into them last night. My apologies to the folks who are getting an email response a week or two later than you should have.
It’s not like I can trim down the email flow really. All of the stuff in there is worth attention of some kind. Either info from coworkers, messages from folks about conferences or Mobile Monday events, responses or follow-ups to blog posts, personal correspondence, or announcements. It’s all stuff that I want to know and need to digest in some way. So it’s not something that I can just script away. At least not until someone comes up with an effective API for loading information into your head. Kinda sucks that it’s a closed system like it is, huh? Someone needs to come up with a good unlock hack for it.
In the meantime I’m considering what I could script out of it. It’s not like I can pluck the messages out and discard them or act on them automatically. However I could do something like coming up with a better visualization method for them. Say a tag cloud view of the messages currently in my inbox for example. Which probably wouldn’t do much good, but gives an idea of the direction I’m thinking in. Of course, once I started to I realized I probably wasn’t the only person thinking in that direction. I ran across what looks like a pretty interesting Python based tool for visualizing your Thunderbird inbox. I haven’t tried it out yet. But hopefully some time before the next excessive email backlog happens I’ll have some time to experiment with it (and maybe a few others, seems like it’s a pretty common theme).
