Half-Life Inbox: A Realistic Way to Tackle E-mail

Half-Life Inbox: A Realistic Way to Tackle E-mail(halflifeinbox.com)

7 points by zetalabs 12 years ago | 15 comments

aaronem 12 years ago |

I'm disappointed this isn't something similar to psdoom [1], as I originally imagined it might be. What could be more natural a metaphor, for the cognitive sink of heavy and mostly superfluous inbox traffic, than headcrabs and headcrab zombies?

[1] http://psdoom.sourceforge.net

zetalabs 12 years ago | |

I'll make sure out frontend lead takes this into account for v2.

aaronem 12 years ago | | |

Excellent! I look forward with eager anticipation to being able to crowbar my way through a full inbox, instead of just wishing I could.

brokenparser 12 years ago | |

They're waiting for you Gordon, in the spam folderrrr.

cliveowen 12 years ago |

I don't understand what's with people and email. My inbox is always zero, I get the seldom update email from Google/Facebook/whatever, but that's it. If I have to contact someone email is the last thing I use, first I try Facebook, text and calling.

I disabled mails from Facebook, Amazon et similia.

I guess the only thing that I do that most people don't is that I don't subscribe to all kinds of crap and I don't put my email address online. In fact, I have had my gmail address since 2009 and I have had exactly 0 spam mail, and that's not hyperbole.

leoedin 12 years ago | |

Do you have a job? It's easy to deal with personal emails (99% of the time they're marketing crap, and the 1% that isn't is something nice from someone you like). It's the work emails that get you (and what I assume this is targeted at, given the "come back from vacation" part)

zetalabs 12 years ago | | |

And then you focus in your work email for a while and personal explodes. At least this happens to me as a vast portion of my network is international.

stigsfoot 12 years ago |

The other half life :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_decay

zetalabs 12 years ago | |

Precisely the model we follow :), and the reason we named the tool that way: "Not only does Half-Life refer to the scientific model, it refers to the feeling that we spend half our lives on answering e-mails."

lassejansen 12 years ago |

Hm, doesn't let me reduce the number to zero.

amarv1n 12 years ago | |

doesn't the blog post explain why? the tool doesn't aim for inbox zero (seen as unrealistic) and the decay-equation doesn't answer for zero because it's an exponential.

zetalabs 12 years ago |

To understand it better, make sure you head to the About section or read the blog post linked at the top of the page.

thirdtruck 12 years ago |

Any plans to make this into a browser extension?

amarv1n 12 years ago | |

how would you envision that working? that'd be interesting.

thirdtruck 12 years ago | | |

Some features that come to mind:

Hiding new mail until a given clear-out session is finished.

A count-down icon with the number of email processings required to wrap up your current clear-out sessions.