I use at least 2 email accounts, one for work, one for personal. For each account, I use Gmail Superstars.

At times, I think about how email affects me. Inbox zero is desirable. And attainable. But, how often do I get to inbox zero? Let's find out.

The gmail .gem gives me the ability to count emails in Gmail and to leverage custom search, so I can search for my Superstarred items.

With a cron job, every hour, I emit 4 counts from each of my email accounts to a TimeSeries table. With a key, value, and created_at time, I now have data objects that represent this count, over time. Now, to visualize it.

I've used D3 in the past, but recently, I used Vis.js for a timeline and had good success, so I decided to use it again.

The chart

The story

The chart above depicts my email count (and substates for my email, like items to respond to, or things I am awaiting a response on). The chart shows the day before New Year's, I deleted a bunch of email.

Before going back to work after the New Year, I have time to do my weekly GTD Processing; processing a bunch of emails.

During the work-week, my personal email accumulates.

I'm curious to see what this pattern reveals in more time.