Episode 59 Building an Email Calculator with Michael Einstein part 3

Ever longed for a tool that could give you feedback on the health of your email inbox? Listen in as I take on the challenge of creating one from scratch. Here in the third and final episode in this series, I continue working with Dr. Michael Einstein to create an email health calculator. We take the lessons learned from the prior discussion and start by listing a hierarchy of concerns. They are listed here from 1-5 in rank order. 1. How many days of stored email are accumulated?  (read vs unread, subscribed vs non-subscribeds) 2. How old are these message? (read vs. unread) 3. How unique are these messages? (subscribed vs non-subscribeds) 4. How fast are they entering? (incoming email) 5. How complicated are they by being threaded? During the hiatus since the last episode, I drafted a weight for each measure and after playing with the tool we would be using, producing the following formula which we discussed in this episode. 0.25 x Left Behind Index (i.e. (Total messages in your inbox - unread messages-tagged, read messages)/incoming email each day) 0.20 x Number of Days Surprise Index (i.e. unread messages – unread subscriptions email)/incoming email each day) 0.20 x Total messages older than a day)/incoming mail each day 0.20 x (Average age of non-Subscription messages/days) 0.20 x ( .50 x Average age of Subscription messages/days) 0.10 x Incoming Email each day / messages removed per day 0.20 x Threaded messages The final input into the calculoid app used the following weights which were simply scaled so that they would sum to 1.0: Field 1  - 18%   Left Behind Index [i.e. (Total messages in your inbox - unread messages-tagged, read messages)/incoming email each day)] Field 2 - 14%   Number of Days Surprise Index [i.e. unread messages – unread subscriptions email)/incoming email each day] Field 3 - 14%   Total messages older than a day)/incoming mail each day Field 4 - 14%   Average age of non-Subscription messages/days Field 5 - 7%    Average age of Subscription messages/days Field 6 - 11%   Max(1, incoming email/150) Field 7 - 7%    Incoming Email each day / messages removed per day Field 8 - 14%   Threaded messages x #average active participants in each thread Want to support the work at 2Time Labs? Here's my Patreon Link. Patrons receive a number of benefits including early access and followup conversations related to work like this.