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If you use Gmail and have trouble clearing out your inbox, you should play The Email Game. The Email Game is a completely free site that hooks into your Gmail account that gamifies answering your email.
After you connect The Email Game with your Gmail account, the service presents you with a simplified view of your inbox, and then shows you one email at a time and asks you what you want to do with it.
When you first view each message, The Email Game gives you a certain amount of time to read each message (you get more time if the original message is longer). Then, before the timer hits zero, you decide what to do with it. For each message you can:
- Respond to or forward the email
- Archive (or delete) the message
- Boomerag the message (which temporarily archives a message and brings it back into your inbox automatically later on)
- Skip the message (which the service discourages)
When you first click on a message, you’re given a certain amount of time to read it based on how long the message is, and a bunch of options of what to do with the message. The smily face gets happier as you blow through your inbox :-)
After you blow through your inbox, the service then compares how you did to other users of the service, and to your own past results.
The Email Game presents you stats on how you did after you clear out your inbox.
The interface is a bit clunky (it looks fresh out of 1995), but don’t let that fool you. The Email Game is a powerful tool that will make you infinitely more productive and focused the next time you have to blow through your emails. If you hate email, or get so much of it that it’s hard to keep your head above water, you should play The Email Game. The Email Game keeps you accountable and focused, and it’s worth taking a look at.
I highly recommend it.
