Checking emails every single day & emptying an inbox is very hard to attain. There’s nothing worse than seeing an avalanche of emails, an inbox crammed with unread messages from yesterday or the week before the moment you open your email account! It seems like an endless daunting task to get caught up with every single email that comes in and to be honest we should spend less time struggling to keep up, if we could just organize them on a daily basis.
Having these same sentiments in mind, Baydin, which is in the 2011 class of 500 Startups, created this utterly amazing webapp/website, The Email Game. The email game is a website that imports your inbox (gmail for free, outlook/exchange/other corporate solutions for a fee) and changes the way that you interact & delegate your incoming mails. It has a countdown timer and the carrot of points for completing various actions on an email. Basically, turning mundane tasks into a game which increases your likelihood of actually doing them.
So here’s how it works:
Go to emailga.me & give the web app the permission to access your Gmail account & you will be directed to this screen to start the email game.
Click start and let the fun begin!
Bear in mind that the main goal is to get emails out of your inbox & put them where they’re supposed to be. The 3 main actions are responding/replyin, boomeranging ( which returns the email to your inbox after any length of time you would like, be it a few hours or a month) and archiving/deleting. So for every email, decide what to do with it.
Try to clear you inbox as much as you can and you’ll get higher points.
Click archive or delete and you’ll receive some positive feedback, along with points:
When you need to respond to an email, you have 3 minutes to do so by default. Get your response written quickly to receive the most points, but you can always add more time if you need to write a longer email.
When you’re done going over your emails, you’ll see your score, along with the option to share it on Twitter:
How cool is that? Now, go ahead and have fun taming your inbox and invite your friends for some friendly & healthy competition!