In August 2007 the University’s email system delivered about 6.6 million emails to staff and 2.9 million to students. The central email gateway rejected 32.5 million spam emails. [Source: Vice-Chancellor's email "Come September" sent to all staff, 28 September 2007]
I’m probably responsible for more than my fair share of this email traffic. The job titles I’ve held tend to attract quite a bit of unsolicited mail from outside the University, and a large proportion of our internal business is done in writing. Plus I belong to several email discussion lists.
Recently I’ve been playing with Xobni, a plugin for Microsoft Outlook. It’s fast to download, easy to install and simple to use.
xobni sets itself up as a pane/menu on the right-hand side of your Outlook window. As you read and act upon emails, Xobni provides information about your various contacts — name and phone number, what time of day they’re likely to respond to your messages, when you last contacted them, documents you’ve shared with each other… It also offers super-fast searching of your emails — much faster than Outlook’s built-in search.
While I’m not a big fan of the GTD/personal productivity cult, I can see some advantages to using Xobni. Mostly, the benefit is that it speeds up routine Outlook tasks like finding contacts and documents. Less wasted time = less low-level stress.
(Xobni is “inbox” spelled backwards)
More information: Xobni web site
Tags: search, xobni, outlook, email, productivity
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