
Half-Life Inbox: A Realistic Way to Tackle E-mail - zetalabs
http://www.halflifeinbox.com
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aaronem
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](http://psdoom.sourceforge.net)

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

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

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cliveowen
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.

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leoedin
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)

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zetalabs
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.

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stigsfoot
The other half life :-)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_decay](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_decay)

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zetalabs
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."

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

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amarv1n
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.

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

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thirdtruck
Any plans to make this into a browser extension?

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amarv1n
how would you envision that working? that'd be interesting.

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thirdtruck
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.

