Many of us work in jobs where we are tied to our inboxes, and spend the majority of each day checking email. I would expect that most people would like to spend less time checking email, yet it seems that we are now buying blackberries and iPhones so we can check our email more regularly and from more locations.

We are worried about the consequences of missing an important message, so we keep checking our mail more and more regularly. With the volume of email on the increase, and customers / bosses demanding faster response times, it's little wonder people aren't getting any work done.

Hi, My name is Harvey Kane and I'm a web developer who gets a lot of email coming in - the above statement pretty well summed me up until about 5 months ago. I went from checking my email every 5 minutes to checking only 2 or 3 times a day, and for urgent queries, my customers are able to get a response from me faster than ever before.

The idea for this system started last year, when I was looking for ways to optimize my workday after reading 'The four hour work week' by Tim Ferriss. Ferriss proposes some pretty radical changes in this book, some of which aren't for everyone, however the really interesting change he suggested was to stop checking your email constantly and reduce to checking once a day or even once a week. At the time, I just didn't see how this could work given that I was often being thrown urgent or important jobs via email that simply needed to be dealt with.

So, before I could quit my habit of checking the email every 5 minutes, I needed a way to make sure I could be reached easily and quickly in the case of anything genuinely urgent arising, which does happen on occasion. The answer was SMS messaging on my cellphone - I always carry my cellphone with me, and it tells me when there is a message rather than me having to check.

What if I got a SMS notification every time something important hit my email inbox?

I'm already getting SMS messages whenever a web server goes offline, so why can't I get a SMS notification when a client needs something done urgently, or when an email I'm expecting arrives? After looking through my last 6 months worth of emails, 2 things were abundantly clear:

1. There just weren't that many items in my inbox that were genuinely urgent - there were perhaps half a dozen emails a month that couldn't have waited until the next day to be dealt with. I was getting myself all worked up over these urgent messages, which in reality, didn't actually come in all that often.
2. There was a pattern to almost all the urgent messages in my inbox. Most had either asap, urgent, critical, or important in the subject line, or some other text that was consistent.

A computer can do that!

The next part was easy. I wrote a PHP script and stuck it on my server which checked my email for me every 10 minutes. In there was an unread message sitting there containing 'urgent' in the subject line, it sent a SMS message to my cellphone. Brilliant. I then told my key clients about the new system and added some information to my email signature and webpage so others would know, and at this point I felt comfortable that I could go to checking email 3 times a day without missing anything urgent.

Shocked

It would be an understatement to say how my life changed after reducing to 3 email sessions a day. My productivity doubled, and all of a sudden I found that I didn't really need to outsource that extra work to the contractors I had been using because I was getting through it all myself. It took a few weeks for the first client to actually use the 'urgent' feature I had told them about - and they got a response within 10 minutes, while I was pounding the treadmill at the gym. Since installing the system I have been woken up a handful of times in the middle of the night - and in all cases I was glad the system had woken me rather than the problem being compounded by being left until morning. This simple system allowed me, as a one-man operation to provide far more responsive service than other much larger companies provided.

You might be wondering what is stopping clients from marking everything as 'urgent', and treating this as an opportunity to badger you even more than usual? This was easy - when I initially explained the new system to them, I also explained that I would be charging extra for any 'urgent' emails that weren't genuinely urgent. I'm quite happy to be woken up at 3am if a website goes offline, but if you want urgent assistance on something that should really wait until morning, that costs extra. Clients understand this concept extremely well.
(By the way, you can also turn off after hours SMS notifications if you don't want them.)

Tweaks

Seeing as this system is connecting to my inbox every 10 minutes, I might as well have it doing some housekeeping while it's in there. How about the following...

• Delete any Facebook notifications that have been sitting there longer than a day
• Move any read emails from my mum or dad into a folder called 'personal messages'.
• Delete anything containing 'Link Exchange' in the subject.
• Move any blog comments / forum notifications into the appropriate folders, I'll deal with those all at once when I have time.
• Delete any duplicate messages (I'm often signed up for 2 copies of the same newsletter)
• File any client message that has been 'flagged' into the appropriate client folder
• Send me an instant message via MSN if [person's name] contacts me in the next 24 hours (I'm expecting their message)

All of this happens every 10 minutes, and as new rules get entered into the system, it gets more accurate at handling and sorting my mail for me. Today, Low-calorie Inbox has filed / sorted / deleted about 150 messages for me - what makes this different from other filters is that I'm in control of when they get filtered - the filtering doesn't happen as soon as the message is received like with other mail filters, a subtle but important difference.

Remote working

At the same time as I started implementing these features, another problem I had been having magically disappeared. I check my mail from 2 laptops, webmail, and my cellphone, and in the past all filtering was done from Thunderbird on my main Windows computer. If this was switched off, there was no filtering and this caused the inbox to fill up with crap a number of times.

If you are the type of person who works from more than one computer - or if you have an iPhone or Blackberry, then Low-calorie Inbox is perfect as it's independent of the other devices you are using. I'm currently in Ireland, and travelling to Germany shortly for 3 months before heading back home to New Zealand. I'm using all kinds of internet connections and lots of different devices (laptops, phones, webmail) to connect, yet my inbox magically stays well organized and I'm still only checking 2-3 times a day while operating a full-time business.

Despite massive time-zone differences between my customers and I, they know they can reach me 24x7 if they really need to, wherever I happen to be.

Low-calorie Inbox

After running this system myself for the last 5 months, it's clear as daylight that this system is something you wouldn't want to be without. So I have taken the time to re-write the code to make it more secure, make it easier to use, and allow more flexibility in how the rules are handled. I call the new system 'Low-calorie Inbox', because it helps you get your inbox lightweight and healthy.

Low-calorie Inbox is not merely a mail filter - it's designed specifically for people who want to escape their inbox, use multiple devices, and perhaps travel the world while they do it. This is exactly what I designed it for, and it does it's job very effectively.

What we offer

Because this system has been so effective at increasing my own productivity, I have created Low-calorie Inbox for others to use.
It's not free, and here's why - firstly, I don't want the server overloaded with 'free' accounts that take up all the resources - I want the service to be fast and efficient, not least because I'm using it myself. Secondly, if you are serious about increasing your productivity then this is a shortcut to the good stuff - I have spent months developing and refining the system using real clients as test subjects (I'm not sure they were aware of this!), and are confident it will do the same for you. It easily doubled my productivity, and email slaves around the world should be able to save hours each week by using this service.
I'm yet to finalize the pricing for this, but it will be in the order of 'a few dollars per month'. While I'm not yet accepting orders until the system is complete, if you are interested you can register your interest using the form below - I'll be in touch once we are ready to launch.