15 million is a big number

This week we passed a big milestone: 15 million minutes saved by our users.

An incredible amount of time is wasted in our inboxes over the course of a day. If you keep up with our blog you’ll know that an average employee spends 13 hours a week reading and responding to email, which is a whopping 28% of our work time. The question is how much of this time could be saved by implementing the right email tools and strategies?

The answer: A WHOLE LOT!

Constant interruptions kill productivity

Our ability as humans to concentrate is severely impacted by constant interruptions. Focusing on any task, no matter the complexity is difficult while constantly being interrupted by emails. A case study conducted by the Danwood Group (here) found it takes 1.5 minutes on average to read and recover from an email. The Danwood Group case study provides a very insightful example of this dilemma and it is as follows:

Lets say an employee is alerted every 5 minutes when they receive new mail, which means there’s potential for 96 interruptions in a regular 8-hour workday. If it takes 1.5 minutes to read and recover from an email this leaves 3.5 minutes until the employee is interrupted again. Now lets say this same employee changes the alert to go off every 45 minutes instead of 5, this means interruptions decrease to 11 per day. If 9 emails accumulated over 45 minutes it will take 6 minutes on average to read and recover from the interruption, which leaves 39 minutes until the next interruption.

Sanebox to the rescue

This shows how decreasing the frequency of email related interruptions can save you a significant amount of time. The bottom line is the longer you’re able to concentrate the more productive you can be through out the day. Every one of us desires to increase our personal productivity and that of our employees, if we have them. That’s why the we built Sanebox to help save you time by cutting down on distractions.

How it works

SaneBox moves unimportant, non-urgent emails out of your inbox and into your SaneLater folder, where they can be processed in bulk at a later time. Based on a number of studies on this subject, we conservatively estimate that we save 30 seconds for every email we move out of the Inbox. Sanebox will also send you summaries of your unimportant emails including the sender and subject line at specified times, so you can quickly review and process these messages in one fell swoop.

Further Reading

  1. Danwood Case Study: Evaluating the Effect of Email Interruptions within the Workplace
  2. Oklahoma City University Research: An Explanatory Analysis of Email Processing Strategies
  3. Mchigan State University Study: Timecourse of recovery from task interruption: data and a model

SaneBox face lift continues

To all our beloved SaneBox users, please log in and check out our new settings page 

(and for those non-SaneBox lunatics out there… run and sign up for SaneBox right now… jeez)

I thought fielding this new page presented an opportunity to talk about what we hope to accomplish with our new face lift.  Probably all of this is common sense to most of you…

But, for me this was a revelation that came about from hiring Dmitri, our new VP of Growth, who has over seen this whole process with Pablo and his band of Argentine geniuses at GotVertigo

We hope to …

1. become more approachable - email filtering is simply not sexy and can sound somewhat daunting so we need to find a way to show the world how fun and easy it can be

2. explain with text and pictures - some people understand from reading and some from looking - we get that and are trying to do a better job of explaining our features and data in a more rounded way. 

3. separate advanced features from normal stuff

4. stop burying the lead - more important stuff is now bigger and closer to the top of the page.

5. explain that this is all about saving time. it’s not about filtering or deferring or new tools for your email - it is about saving you time so you can do something else.

Still left to do:

1. movies, movies, movies - yup pictures that move

2. face lift for our emails to you. 

3. more work on our help desk.

We love comments and criticism, so if you have a great change you are dying for us to make please send it to support@sanebox.com

SaneBox is looking for a great software engineer

The Problem:

People are overwhelmed by the email they receive.  We solve that by separating the wheat from the chaff.  People love that and they are happy to pay us for solving it.  

The Stack:

Ruby, Rails, Mysql as well as interacting with IMAP, WebDav and EWS.

The Work:

1. Which emails are worthless?  Which emails are really important?   Which emails should wait, but not forever?

2. Figure this out without reading the body of the email.

3. Do this in a scalable, easily maintained way, so that you don’t need 40,000 engineers and a data center’s worth of hardware to support it.

The Challenges:

1. Email is very private, ensuring users privacy is job one.

2. Microsoft Exchange servers are the Internet Explorer of the email server world

3. Most mail services require a password to access and everyone has been told to never give their password to anyone. 

4. Oh yeah: people get a lot of email but hate when they miss something important.

The Best Part:

This is like crack, but in a good way.  We get love letters from users. Check out http://sanebox.com/testimonials

Some examples of stuff we’ve done in the last couple of months

1. set up a reward referral program

2. support the sad but lucrative world of Microsoft Exchange by integrating the EWS protocol into our system

3. create some powerful email tools that allow users to control their unimportant email from an email summary digest

4. iteratively improve mysql performance

5. update apache config to avoid the latest DOS attack

You must:

1. like working for someone who actually cares if you are happy

2. like working on a project that makes people happy 

3. like working on a project that has lots of active users

4. like making things that people use

5. not mind being on call.  everyone on the engineering team is on call periodically

6. be a SaneBox user

If this is you:

Send a cover letter and resume and current pay requirements to roseman at sanebox dot com.  You will probably go into my @SaneLater folder, but that won’t last very long. Most of our team operates remotely so if you have a decent Internet connection you are good to go. (don’t forget… you get extra points for humor)

Notice 2 new buttons in your SaneBox email digest!!   Flag &Train these emails… takes you to a web page to conveniently do that. You can also archive from that web page! Archive All… yeah you can just archive them all.  If you don’t have an archive folder, we will create SaneArchive for you and put them there. We also call this the Bijan-Button (his idea). If you see something you want to process and everything else is archive-worthy, click “Flag and Move to Inbox” on the interesting one, wait a moment, and then click “Archive All” And, in the odd instance, where we made a mistake, click “Train to INBOX” and that will never happen again.
Pop-upView Separately

Notice 2 new buttons in your SaneBox email digest!!  

Flag &Train these emails… takes you to a web page to conveniently do that. You can also archive from that web page!

Archive All… yeah you can just archive them all.  If you don’t have an archive folder, we will create SaneArchive for you and put them there. We also call this the Bijan-Button (his idea).

If you see something you want to process and everything else is archive-worthy, click “Flag and Move to Inbox” on the interesting one, wait a moment, and then click “Archive All”

And, in the odd instance, where we made a mistake, click “Train to INBOX” and that will never happen again.

Soon you won’t have to visit your SaneLater folder

We here at SaneBox think you should spend as little time as possible on your email. You have better things to do with your time!

So we take the unimportant stuff out of your INBOX so it won’t distract you.

And we send you an email digest of the unimportant stuff so you can quickly search for nuggets of gold.

Now you can move those nuggets to your INBOX from the digest!!!

If you are like me and you want to stay in your INBOX whenever possible this new feature is a huge boon. With one click in your email digest (Arrow #2 in the picture), you flag and move any unimportant email and our email monkeys will move that email to your INBOX and flag it  to make it easy to find.

You can still “train” a particular kind of email (Arrow #1 in the picture) to your INBOX from the digest with a single click.  And when you do that **all** emails of that kind will be deemed INBOX-worthy.

Now you have to find something productive to do with all this time we are saving you. Remember your family?  your job? an old friend?  

What does your SaneBox Ranking mean?

Your weekly activity report now declares your “ranking” amongst the other SaneBox users. What does this number mean?

The idea behind the ranking is to give each SaneBox user points for good email behavior and take away points for bad behavior.  Your overall count reflects this algorithm.  And your particular ranking is meant to nudge users to develop better email habits.

The ultimate SaneBox user would do the following:

1. Process their email the first time you open it. (deal with it and then file,archive,delete or defer it)

2. do a good job of declaring as much email as possible unimportant.  

David Allen in GTD says to focus on the most important thing **now**. And avoid getting distracted by the shiny stuff. You can only do this if you are willing to admit that there are lots of emails that are unimportant.  In SaneBox parlance, this means that you get penalized for gratuitously making emails INBOX worthy.  Seriously, do you need to know that your new toothbrush shipped in the last 5 minutes. 

3. Process more email.  Sorry those of you who get less email.  We are rewarding the heavy lifting that some of our high bandwidth users are doing.  But don’t give up, the other 3 rules can overcome this one.

4. Don’t fidget with your unimportant email.  That stuff is unimportant for a reason. We put it in a separate folder so you won’t feel the siren call.  If you can’t bear the feeling that you are missing something, have your email digest summary arrive more often.

We will be adding to these rules over time, but this gives you a sense of why you are super star or why you might need to change some of those bad email behaviors.

Best Wishes,

Stuart

President/Founder SaneBox

Announcing… User defined Sane folders

Hi Guys,

We have always tried to make SaneBox as GTD-like as possible. GTD means do what is most important right now. Keep your focus and be productive. SaneBox does this by creating an INBOX with exactly what you need to deal with NOW. But, GTD also points out that there are projects that need to get done later that require little pieces of work as you go along.  Now SaneBox addresses this too.

One of the highest requested features on SaneBox is the ability for us to filter by topic instead of importance.  One user suggested the ability to create a folder with receipts that needed to be booked into an expense report at the end of the month. This suggested use case really resonated with me.

I use Kashoo.com to keep SaneBox’s accounting books.  And there is a set of emails that need to get “booked” every month as an expense or income.  So having those emails corralled into one folder for me is a huge time saver.

Now SaneBox can’t guess which email receipts need to be booked in my accounting system, versus receipts that are simply needed for reference, so to make this work, we invented “User Defined Sane Folders”.

You click on the “add user defined folder” link in the http://sanebox.com/settings page.  Name the folder whatever you want. And start throwing emails into it.  

I already have a @SaneKashoo folder and it has lowered my stress level enormously. Instead of being bummed out everytime I see those receipt emails that I haven’t booked yet, I now know that they are waiting for me to deal with them when I have time.  All nicely organized in @SaneKashoo.

We have plans to allow users to re-use each other’s Sane folder definitions and we are thinking of rewarding those users with the **most** re-used folders.

But, in the meantime, make yourself one and make your life a little more organized.

Hope you enjoy this feature as much as I am!

Best Wishes,

Stuart

How to get SaneBox for free… forever

Last week, somewhat quietly, we fielded Referral Rewards. Thanks to Andrew Parker for a great idea.

Here’s how it works:

You join SaneBox. SaneBox will move distracting emails out of the way.  And using our defer, black hole, and SPAM monitor folders you will save yourself copious amounts of time and effort.  AND your first 30 days are free.

Then, you invite a friend to sign up for SaneBox either using the invitation page or sending them a special invitation link.  They sign up.  You auto-magically get another free 30 days of SaneBox. You get 30 days for every friend that signs up.

So sign up 11 friends this year and get SaneBox for free for the whole year!

Do this every year and you never have to pay us a cent.  But, shhhh…. don’t tell anyone because we’d like for some people to pay :-)

It is finally Summer in Boston.  Can you tell that puts all of us here at SaneBox into a good mood?

Get your digest whenever you want

The biggest challenge for those using SaneBox is “letting go” of the unimportant stuff and concentrating on their INBOX. To help with this, we send an “unread, unimportant email digest” which allows everyone to quickly scan the cruft to make sure there isn’t a nugget of gold there.

Now you can have this digest whenever you want it!

go to http://sanebox.com/settings and click on “Email Preferences”

You can choose to get the digest

1. Every Day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday

2. Any time (12:00AM, 1:00AM, etc…)

then 3. Click “Add”

You can “Add” as many scheduled digest times as you would like.

You can remove all of the current scheduled digest times, but don’t because you should check your @SaneLater folder regularly.  

Remember to make sure we have the correct time zone for your location so these times are correct.

Enjoy!

Stuart

President/Founder SaneBox

Status of SaneBox

In my on-going attempt to live my startup life out loud, here is the status of SaneBox.com

SaneBox was started on 2/20/2010.  

It automatically files unimportant emails into a @SaneLater folder so your Inbox is free of distractions.  

It does this with global rules and a statistical analysis of your email history and your relationships with other social networks.  Training is as easy as moving an email from the wrong folder to the correct one. It has an @SaneBlackHole folder for training emails to trash and folders for deferring emails. It can also discern up to 5 levels of importance and file accordingly. It can report every week on how you are doing with your email.

Milestones:

1 month to first private beta user.

6 months to first direct free bundled competition: Google Priority Inbox

8 months to public release on gmail and google apps.

Now: (11 Months later)

Since going public (users having to pay after the initial 30 day trial) we are converting at 11.33%.  So we get 11 paying customers for every 100 trails.  People tell me that this is good, but I still reach out to the other 89 users every time to see how we failed them. I will blog about why people quit SaneBox separately.

We have been adding features and improving accuracy and scaling and now have aworking beta to provide SaneBox for ALL IMAP servers: yahoo.com, me.com, exchange, dovecot, you name it.  This involves taking user passwords so we have upped the overall security of everything including encrypting those passwords and all authorization credentials with a key that has to be typed in by hand.  If someone were to steal the code AND the database, they still would not have access to those passwords.  If you want in on the beta, email me: roseman dash beta at sanebox dot com.

The website was running a bounce rate of 62% so I hired Performable to put together some new landing pages and they are in the midst of A/B testing to bring those numbers under control.  I’ll blog about this effort separately.  What do you think of the website?  My team hates the font.

I am installing 2 new blades with 24 cores and 128GB of RAM each which will 5x our current capacity.

So far our traffic has been generated 100% virally. It’s time to start paying for key words.

That’s it for now.  I’m off with my wife for a kidless, not-on-call, 4 nights and 5 days, beach vacation tomorrow. It’s supposed to start snowing again here in Boston at 9AM. Our plane takes off at 8:45AM.  Wish us luck.