July 16, 2008

New bot manages insanity of e-mail

http://www.jewishjournal.com/geekheeb/item/new_bot_manages_insanity_of_e_mail_20080716/

Much like the fax machine in the 1990s, e-mail has gone from daily novelty to hourly (minutely?) scourge. Wired's Clive Thompson knows from an inundated inbox, and he recently tried out Xobni, an Outlook for Windows plugin that figured out when he's most likely to get e-mail. Thanks to the e-mail bot, Thompson knows to check for new message at two specific times during the day. Hello productivity!

Xobni spots hidden patterns in your email usage. It identifies, for instance, who your most important contacts are, what time of day they typically send email, and how long it takes you to reply to one another. I discovered that the missives I care about most — from my wife, editors, and closest friends — tend to arrive in bursts during the mid-morning and late afternoon.

This is incredibly useful knowledge. These days, instead of leaving my email open all the time and jumping with Pavlovian slaver at each ding, I check in only during what I now know are my two "hot zones." I can work uninterrupted most of the day with the confidence that I'll be online when the on-fire messages arrive.

Artificial intelligence in the service of life-hacking: It's the future of email. (Wired)