emendatio

Monitor your email behavior with Xobni.

19. Jan. 2008 von Robert Günther in How-To

Have you heard, read (here or here) of or even installed the new Xobni plugin for MS Office? If not better hurry and do so because Xobni brings some nice features Outlook itself is missing. It installs as a fifth column (depending on your interface layout) and instantly starts scanning your mailbox. It took 25 minutes to scan all my mails and archives, giving you a nice coffee break. When you click on a mail the Xobni column will display a graphical overview on the frequency of your conversation with the respective person. The search function in my oppinion is a bit better and faster than the built in Outlook search engine.

As you can see on the image above, you even get the chance to insert a picture per person. You can call the person directly, the embedded skype links works great, send a new email or plan a meeting. Below this box you will find a list of people this person is connected to, a list of your most recent conversations and files you exchanged. While this is mostly just eyecandy especially the "Files exchanged with …" box is really helpful when you’re looking for that last excel sheet that your colleague send and you saved, well, somewhere.

Way more powerfull and a real productivity improvement tool are the analytic capabilities of Xobni. It tracks all your inoming and outgoing emails and calendar entries, collects all data and timestamps and puts it together and summarizes it.

On the screenshot aboice you can see an analysis of the mail traffic in my inbox. Well beside the obvious information about my starting time, lunch and the time I’m going home this gives a pretty good idea on my responsive behavior. But it gets even better, Xobni analytics also tracks your respone time, meaning how fast and often you respond to emails at what time of the day.

Looking at this information gives you a very good idea on how your behavior towards your inbox changes during the day. I noticed for myself that the respond time in the afternoon is a lot longer than in the morning. I spend some time investigating this and found out that most of the time I get the real "hard stuff", the mails that need the most effort, are send to me right after lunch. As I am usually a bit tired after eating this would be contra productive: beeing sleepy at the most heavy work of the day. I therefore moved my lunch break to 11am to be fit for work at 1pm.

I think there are still many ways to improve the analysis tool and way more data to track. I’d personally like to see how fast which person respons to my emails, what is the word ratio between send and received emails, how similar are the responses to my outgoing emails? It might also be a nice idea to get a graphical idea on the entire CC situation in your inbox: who also receives emails you get and how close are you to this person, do you also reply to him/ her, does he/ she send emails as well or only receives them?

One last thing I’d like to add, the improvement part of course. I would love to have the Xobni column as a widescreen row below the regular outlook interface. I can’t help it but the column is stealing way too much space on my screen. The second thing deals with memory usage. Since I’ve installed Xobni I noticed a small performance decrease in Outlook: it boots a bit slower and the indexing of long and complex emails often slows the entire machine.

Nevertheless Xobni is a fantastic tool and a lot more than just eye candy. If you use to track information, emails and contacts it will greatly improve your working speed with emails. Check out the website for some video intros.

Link: Xobni

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