How much is your email worth?

A coworker recently sent me a link for a company's website promoting a cool concept for dealing with email overload. Seriosity's Attent borrows some ideas from the online role playing gaming world and provides a way to attach virtual currency to emails you send and receive.

When you send an email, you attach an amount of virtual currency, called "Serios". You attach the number of Serios you think the email is "worth", meaning the amount required to get your email read. The recipient (assuming they are also an Attent user) sees the number of Serios you attached and emails with the most float to the top of the inbox.

You have a limited amount of Serios to spend, so you have to choose wisely. The idea is that having to attach a limited resource to your emails forces you think a little more about how valuable your communications really are. You get more Serios when people send you emails with them attached and you also get an allowance of 100 new Serios each week that you send at least one.

There are some cool features such as visibility to recipients' Serio balance and history so you can get an idea of how many Serios you'll need to spend to get someone's attention.

I think this is an intriguing and promising concept. The company has plans to expand this to other forms of communication, and I think it would work even better when instant messaging, phone calls, and even support requests are included in the Serios financial world. It would be great as an incentive for participating in collaboration sites.

The biggest downside to Attent is that it requires a "critical mass" of connected users to make it useful. So, I encourage everyone who reads this to try it out!

Reducing email distractions

Email has the potential to be very distracting. How many times a day do you check your email? Everytime that little Outlook notification pops up about a new email coming in, don't we all immediately go read it? That's a lot of interruptions in a typical day.

As of this morning, I'm trying out a new way to process email to reduce those distractions. I'm going to check my inbox just three times a day: first thing in the morning, around noon, and at the end of the day. I hope to get that down to two checks a day eventually.

I've turned off the default Outlook notifications. I've removed the Outlook icons from the notification area in the taskbar. I set up a new rule to pop up an alert if I get an urgent email (so if you need me to respond immediately, mark it urgent).

To make sure I don't need to spend much time in my inbox, I use a system very similar to that described in Getting Things Done where I immediately process the items in my inbox. They go into one of several specially named folders I created: @Action - Now, @Action - Soon, @Someday, @Waiting; or they get deleted; or they get moved into one of my reference folders (I have one for each project). The special folders start with "@" to sort them to the top of the folder list in Outlook. By moving things into one of these folders immediately, it keeps the inbox very clean.

@Action - Now is for emails I need to act on today. @Action - Soon is for things I need to act on but at a lower priority. @Someday are things I want to read in more detail and possibly act on later. And @Waiting is for emails that I can't do anything with yet because I'm waiting on someone else.

I'm one of the few people who actually likes the Outlook Today feature in Outlook. I have it configured to show me the next 7 days of my calendar, my task list, and the message counts of my inbox and the four special folders I mentioned above.

I'll let you know how it all works out.