When can you expect my next blog post?

Just in case you're one of those wondering whats with the series of posts in my blog over the past few days, yes I did make 4 posts in 3 days. Now, let me help you understand why and also possibly answer the question in this posts' title, by digging into some data in the background.

Since I resumed blogging early last year, I've posted 90 articles here. Lets first look at the rhythm of posting, something that I've written several time earlier about, and have been striving extra-hard to maintain. The posting pattern over the nearly 2-year period is as follows:

From the above its clear that I've managed to maintain some consistency over the months; an average of 4.04 posts per month. However, whats not obvious here is the posting pattern within the month. To understand potential effect of my self-imposed monthly deadline, we'll have to look at when the posts are made within each month.

I've split each month into 3 periods: 1-10th, 11-20th and 21st until end of the month. When the monthly aggregation is broken down into these periods, some patterns start emerging. I've made a small correction for the bulk-publishing of my back-packing diary, which incidentally was posted in the middle of the month (17th May '15), after weeks of writing. I've changed the value of '17 posts' on this date to an above-average number of '2 posts', as an approximation.

The below table is coloured to show which of the 3 periods within a month have most posts, over the last 2 years. Its obvious that I've hardly made any posts in the first 10 days of any month (red shaded cells below), while the last 10 days are fertile periods, showing up in green. Most of the posts are generally made in the last 10 days of a month, at times spilling over into the last few days within this cycle.

What this also means is that roughly two-thirds of all posts are made a few days before the deadline! Old habits die hard, so guess I'll have to change the deadline to a weekly one as opposed to monthly. Perhaps, that could help spread out the posts through the month.

Hopefully my next post would be earlier than the 30th of December, though the above analysis strongly suggests that as the possible answer!

Evolution of Gramener Design Toolset

Earlier this month, I had written an article in our company blog. I'm reposting it here again:

At Gramener, we have been continuously evolving our Design process over the past years. These improvements have been to stay in tune with the emerging trends in design, adopt industry standard tools and create a custom Design framework that helps us deliver outstanding visualizations.

This post covers the ‘tools’ aspect of the design improvements we’ve implemented, and it discusses the challenges faced and considerations on coming up with a pertinent toolset to cater to Gramener’s core offering of Information Design & Data Visualization.

Earlier Process brief and toolset used:

Until a year back, the primary tool we used during the design phase was paper-pencil for creation of Design concepts, while the actual designs were created on Powerpoint. For most engagements we had a low-fidelity design as deliverable, wherein the paper sketches were translated to a basic representation on MS Powerpoint using snipped images of charts and other basic dashboard components.

In certain engagements, when there was a need to show a closer-to-actual representation, a high-fidelity design was created, again on Powerpoint using imported SVG objects or drawn chart elements. There was almost no prototyping or demonstration of interactivity, save the occasional powerpoint slide transitions. The need for an internal Design library was met by having all designs stored on the Gramener file server and exposed on a searchable, minimalistic UI, that was spruced up with basic previews and meta-tags.

Given the ability of Gramex, Gramener’s platform to quickly pull out charts from the engine’s library and setup a basic, working version of visual dashboards, historically, there was not much of a need for a standardized design tool. Hence, Powerpoint was a quick and light alternative that fit in well with the skillset of Data Consultants, which is a role comprised of functional analysts, who had innate comfort with MS Office rather than the Adobe suite of products.

Evolving needs:

With the evolution of projects done by Gramener and the rapid scale-up in clientele and team size, the need was felt for a rethink of the above mentioned stack. With a large number of first-time visualization adopters amongst clients, we sensed their comfort in reviewing solutions with a high-fidelity design that showed visual design aspects as close to the final solution as possible.

With increasing functional complexity and data size of our visual solutions, Data Consultants had to spend more time in the solution conceptualization and data analysis phases, whereas there was an increased need for additional support during the Design phase.

Challenges faced:

In summary, the key challenges faced with the above simplistic process & toolset were:

• Variation in quality, finesse and look-and-feel of designs created on Powerpoint
• Long cycle time for design creation, with an often cumbersome process for putting together the occasional high-fidelity versions
• Teething challenges in development handover & translation of the design
• Need for multiple design reviews during development phase, coupled with rework
• Difficulty in demonstrating state transitions, interactivity and user flow within a visual application concept

Alternate Solution:

Given these challenges and the additional considerations of scalability & rapid replicability, we went about evaluating changes needed in the process, toolsets & framework. We spoke to the design community and took first-hand advice from experts in these areas. From the tools perspective, we evaluated a variety of visual design and prototyping tools including Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Balsamiq, Axure and Pinegrow, amongst others. Based on considerations of fitment to our visualization lifecycle, availability of complementary skillsets at Gramener and ability to address the challenges outlined, we zeroed in on the following:

Sketchapp – for Visual Design:

The vector graphics editor from Bohemian Coding has been rapidly gaining popularity and has quickly built its own community of loyal users. With addition of new role of Information Designer at Gramener, this tool helped us in the following ways:

• We found that the tool was very easy to pickup due to its intuitive usability, perhaps closer to Powerpoint. It also had ample tutorials and a robust support ecosystem
• By design, the tool was meant to create vector objects and naturally fit in better for dashboards and web applications, while other tools were heavily skewed towards graphic design
• Has a thriving ecosystem of plugins for productivity improvement, and importantly provides for easy export of style sheets to aid development translation
• Comes at a relatively economic price compared to popular options, Apple hardware prices notwithstanding

Invision – for Workflow, Prototyping and Design library:

A leading prototyping, collaboration and workflow platform used by several design houses around the world, this tool checked-off multiple items in our requirements list:

• Provides an end-to-end design workflow solution with useful admin features
• Has native integration with Sketch and hence it automatically syncs, imports and stores assets from Sketch files. Automatically creates style sheets & enables direct look-up
• Supports basic prototyping needs to show interactivity and transitions
• Has useful collaboration & commenting features, and integrates live design presentation and review capability
• Doubles up as a repository with versioning & hence can be used as a design library

In Summary, below is the overall process that we have arrived at, which has been working well for us and has addressed most of the above-mentioned issues we faced:

Genetic algorithms: Gaming our life goals

This is the second of my 2-part post on Genetic Algorithms (GA). While the previous post introduced the concept and highlighted the salient features of why I find GA fascinating, this post is an attempt at applying this technique to improve our personal lives.

To summarize the basics, following are the defining aspects of Genetic algorithms, when you apply this to solve an optimization problem:

1. Population: Begin with multiple solutions (random & inefficient, to start with)
2. Evaluation: Set a measurable criteria to evaluate effectiveness of the solution against a target
3. Selection: Select the (relatively) top-ranked solutions, and kill the rest
4. Recombination: Combine these top solutions (say 10%) in some manner to create the next generation of multiple solutions
5. Mutation: Once in a while, instead of the usual Recombination (step #4), create new solutions with some unusual (maybe illogical) logic 
6. Evolution: Iterate with these new solutions and loop through steps #1 through #5 to keep improving solutions, generation after generation until target is achieved

Now, for the parallel to our personal lives and how Genetic Algorithms could possibly come to our rescue. Read each of the below in conjunction to the concepts numbered in the same order 1-thru-6, above:

1. Cultivate multiple habits or choose several activities (say 10 to 15) to pursue at work/home. 
• For instance, joining a gym, waking at 5 AM, setting 1 hr of no-gadgets time every day.
2. Set some end-goals that can be used to measure against. Now periodically (say once a month) evaluate whether each of the habits/activities are taking you any closer to the stated goals. 
• Examples for goals include, learning a new skill, achieving something at work, reducing 15 kg weight, spending more time with loved ones.
3. Continue with those few habits (say top 5)  that propel you towards the goals and discontinue all other activities.
4. Alter the habits slightly by learning from things that worked out. Create variants of new activities (totally the earlier 10 to 15) that are directionally towards your goals.
• For instance, you might try zumba instead of the gym, or wake up at 5.30 AM.
5. Once in a while, break your routine and add some completely random habits, preferably things that make you uncomfortable.
• You may decide to spend one day of your weekend walking around the city on foot, or maybe spend few days every month in the most remote & unconnected part of your state.
6. Continue with this process and iterate with new & improved habits, say every month, until you reach the goal.

One might wonder that parts of the above process look intuitive and some of these could be things one already does. In my opinion, this becomes immensely powerful on account of four things: Choosing a larger set of habits,  measuring them against a set goal periodically, continuously tailoring the habits or totally killing them. Finally the most powerful one is in consciously breaking routine and adopting some bizarre habits.

Let me know what you think.

Genetic algorithms explained: Evolutionary way of problem-solving

I recently learnt about Genetic Algorithms (GA) and must say I've been quite fascinated by it. This is a two-part blog post on this topic. In this first post I will make an attempt to explain it in non-technical terms, with a simple example to illustrate the concept. The second post would be on applying this technique beyond the realm of business problems - by contemplating on how one could apply this to improving some aspects of our lives.

Now onto Part-1.

I had blogged earlier about Biomimicry, which in simple terms is design inspired by nature. Genetic Algorithms fall into the same category of solving human-faced problems, by getting inspiration from nature's solutions. In other words, this is the discipline of copying how nature operates in a bid to come up with similar harmonious solutions.

Placing Evolution in Perspective

To understand Genetic Algorithms, we'll try and understand the biologics of evolution, by using the bare minimum terminologies. 

• We are way too familiar with how one generation of humans are smarter than the previous ones. We, collectively are more evolved and (perhaps) smarter than our ancestors, while the same can be said of our kids who are way ahead of us, thanks to evolution. 
• Per the theory of natural selection, organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring. By survival of the fittest, the more evolved species reproduce more and pass on their genes down the line, while the weaker ones slowly die and get extinct.
• And, there is this quirky process midway wherein some organisms suddenly have completely unexpected traits. There are the geniuses, those highly regarded people in history of mankind with IQ levels closer to 200, like Leonardo Da Vinci. You've most likely heard of rare people with 6-fingers in a hand, which is also quite unusual. All these are likely cases of mutation, wherein suddenly an unexpected change happens, in otherwise linear, incremental evolution. If this change is strong enough to influence rest of the species, it spreads through reproduction and impacts the subsequent generations. Else, it just stays an aberration and doesn't get passed on. To get this in perspective, think X-Men!

In summary, a species of organism keep adapting to their environment, incrementally evolving and getting smarter. The smarter ones survive and reproduce more, while the weaker ones die. Once in a while, there is a sudden & unexpected change in traits of few organisms within the species and if this is remarkable and powerful enough, it gets passed on to the next generation and slowly spreads to become the defining characteristic of the entire species. Else, the mutated offspring dies and doesn't impact rest of the species.

GA: Application to Problems

What if we try and apply this evolutionary biological process to solve problems in the area of optimization. We can create a computer program that exactly mimics this process of evolution by keeping all the ground rules coded in its entirety, grow solutions from generation-to-generation, until we arrive at an optimized solution that is more efficient than a set threshold.

To illustrate with an example, lets take the popular problem of Travelling Salesman. Given a set of 5 cities that a Salesman has to travel to (exactly once to each city), the problem is to find the route that minimizes the distance travelled by the person. This is an optimization problem and while its simple to solve by hand for the 5 cities, it becomes non-trivial if you increase the number, to say 30 cities.

Applying Genetic algorithm to this problem: 

1. Start with a population containing a set of multiple random solutions - that is, multiple ways of ordering the 5 cities. 
2. For each of the solutions in this 1st generation population, evaluate by computing the total distance travelled. Order the solutions from best to worst (within this iteration).
3. Select the top 2 or 3 solutions with their ordering.
4. Marry within this solution by randomly exchanging routes between the solutions (while sticking to ground rules, such as no repetition of cities). This step mimics the reproduction or recombination, as it happens in nature.
5. The above step creates the next generation with a set of new potential solutions.
6. Once in a while (say every 10th iteration), introduce mutation by performing a random operation. For example, you could swap every pair of cities in the route created until that step.

Repeat the same process from step #2 through #6 above, until you arrive at the solution with the lowest distance travelled. Each iteration is the equivalent of one generation and through the process of evolution, each subsequent iteration would have atleast some solutions which are slightly better than the earlier ones. You might iterate through this 100s or 1000s of times depending on the problem, but this process is guaranteed to come up with the most optimal solution.

Summary

The fascinating aspect about this technique is that you can arrive at the best possible solution, and possibly the global minima to any optimization problem. You just need to code this in the structure & process as outlined above, and without getting into construction of complex mathematical equations or their solutions, you can get the best solution through an evolutionary search procedure. Check this article for a more detailed explanation. They seem to be applied to a variety of real-world problems, and they sure hold a lot of promise.

How to read 100 books in a year

I lifted this post title straight from an article on Zapier titled 'How to Read 50 Books a Year, in 7 Easy Steps'. I just doubled the number to make it more appealing.

Though worded like a clickbait title, the author, Stephen Altrogge's content captivated my attention. He offers some sound, practical advice and this was stuff I wasn't practicing, or just didn't know a year earlier. In the light of my dismal progress on my Goodreads 2016 challenge, this is advice worth re-emphasizing to myself.

Let me summarize 5 of the tips I could relate to, here. For a full read, please check out the original post that has several good examples and useful references:

#1: Make your book list.
This helps to not only stay on top of your reading list, but the social integration with friends, recommendations and newsletters keep your motivation levels high.
> I set up mine on GoodReads just earlier this year.

#2: Begin reading atleast 2 books at a time.
To account for mood fluctuations and change in interests at different times of the day/week, this tip retains you within the realm of books. Else, you might end up watching movies, reading endless feeds on Facebook or whatnot.
> I never did this consciously earlier, since I considered it sacrosanct to finish one book cover to cover, before picking up the next.

#3: Read in small chunks.
10 minutes is good enough to catch up on some portion of the text and you don't need hours together to settle down with a book. This is another area where read-out-aloud apps can come in handy.
> This was a liberating tip to break my mental block of the need for atleast an hour to pick up a book.

#4: Learn to increase your reading speed.
Increase your throughput and you increase your net output. There is definite benefit in speed-reading books and I was surprised to hear about browser-extensions and apps that train you on this.
> I have an average reading speed and if the content gets interesting I slow down to savour every word, and take some moments to live the experience vicariously. This tip is something to be tried out.

#5: Be selective with your reading choices.
Life is too short to finish a bad book. There's no shame in putting a book aside or not finishing it, in order to get most out of the next book that you'll actually enjoy finishing. And for some books reading every word might be an 'overkill', and there is a 'layered' approach to get a general understanding of the book.
> This was another revealing tip. A habit closely tied to #2 above, I used to loathe dropping a book midway and there are occasions I had to push myself several weeks to get over to the last page. 

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Physical newsprint becomes history, in my world

The unthinkable has happened.

I've stopped buying a newspaper at home. Yes, permanently. 

I've never considered that the digital medium would obviate the need for a physical, printed news copy at home, so soon. And definitely not when the balance in web-vs-print hasn't started shifting as much in India.

Firstly, some context on why this is big for me. Of over 15 years of subscribing to newspapers, I've been on Economic times for the past 10. Newspapers have steadily grown into an obsession for me over time, so much that I usually hoard papers through the week to catch up on unread stuff over the weekend! I had such an obsession for ET Sunday that I've regularly carried around the past several week's editions for well over a month, at times while travelling as well, until I've fully 'finished' them. And there are times when my days started gloomy because the vendor accidentally skipped the daily newspaper at home.

Going from there, not too long ago, to a state of taking a decision to stop the newspaper for good, has been too rapid, even for my own senses to fathom. There's an interplay of several channels that have made the newspaper redundant for me:

• Firstly, there's a steady set of feeds that I've subscribed to online and set them up for consumption on my feedly channel spanning my core interest areas. 
• I've setup a similar lists across interest areas, for some of the notable users that I follow on twitter through Tweetdeck. This has evolved into a great medium for news discovery and aggregation.
• I have experimented with inshorts app (the fast-growing Indian startup) on my mobile, which surfaces top headlines couple of times during the day. This covers the national, local and other breaking global news.
• These channels pretty much cover everything that I'd like to catch up on. Anything missed here or trending viral stuff surfaces on whatsapp, facebook or other medium - all of which I use sparingly.

Over the past month, I had started noticing the newspaper gathering dust at home. Time bandwidth issues apart, I've seen a better customized match of news and articles of my interest online and the availability of apps & aggregator feeds only makes it all the more easier to create your custom digital newspaper. And that explained why the physical newsprint has lost much of its original sheen. 

It remains to be seen if this decision will be persisted, but directionally that's where I'm headed, for now.

Developing new habits & finding time for your hobbies

"I bought the diet book, but ate my usual foods."

"I filled the prescription, but didn't take the meds."

"I took the course... well, I watched the videos... but I didn't do the exercises in writing."

Merely looking at something almost never causes change. Tourism is fun, but rarely transformative.

If it was easy, you would have already achieved the change you seek.

Change comes from new habits, from acting as if, from experiencing the inevitable discomfort of becoming.


I came across the above interesting post from Seth Godin. How often do we fret over inability to adopt a new schedule or do simple things on a more regular basis? It could be hitting the gym, reading books, practicing a hobby, or a simple thing like remembering to take medicines when you fall sick. Adding tasks to a to-do list or putting up stick-it notes doesn't seal it - you end up looking at it a bit more frequently, but may not get down to do it repeatedly.

From my personal experience, one effective way to achieve this is to fit the aspirational task into your daily habits/sequence of rituals. For instance, setting aside 30 minutes everyday after dinner, to read a book before you hit the bed. If you have a long commute to office, create a library of all those audio podcasts/ted-talks that you always wanted to catch up on.

There are enough undefined/adhoc times in our limited daily schedule, that you could carve out to accommodate that elusive task you aspire to make a habit. Couple of months back, S Kumar, a friend had posted a nice article on the same topic. Do check out his article on "How I found time and got certified in 54 diverse online courses".

Are emails killing your credibility with your users?

After salvaging my work inbox from clutter, I set out to get my personal gmail inbox in order. Only this time the challenge was bigger: with over 25,000 unread emails.

Over the past 10 years, my inbox had fallen into partial neglect and slow decay. With a lot of spam and newsletters flowing in, I missed to do a cleanup.  Though I have been picking up most personal conversations and notifications, given this high noise-to-signal ratio, I had been missing out on some. If you haven't heard back on an email you sent me long ago, you now know why!

When I started cleaning, I couldn't fathom what could possibly cause 25,000 emails over a few years. How much I wish that gmail offered a simple tool that showed a categorical breakup of top sender/type of email, with a simple visual like the one below, that I put together indicatively?

I was horrified to find that every digital interaction online had each produced a stream of 'newsletters'. You buy something on an ecommerce/travel site (Flipkart, Makemytrip...), they send you daily emails on anything that they sell. You install an Android app (Zomato, Tripadvisor...), they spam you. You register for a new service online (Stumbleupon, Flipboard...), they flood you with offers. You register for a conference or download articles, they notify about every event or file that they add. This included websites that I had not directly given my email address, as well.

This apart, there were the set of 'genuine' spam emails sent from dubious entities offering retirement benefits to those promising 'secret offshore funds'. But these were easier of the lot. Its straightforward to clear them and after a few times of classifying them as spam, the gmail spam filter takes over.

I took about 2 weeks to painstakingly clear the newsletters and unsubscribe to all of them. Companies have created this credibility crisis by wilfully pushing daily mailers to unsuspecting consumers, which is not too different from continuous cold-calling your prospects every single day. Most of them don't even bother to check email preferences when they sign you up. What's worse is that for some the unsubscribe process is not straightforward, or just doesn't work. You eventually have to mark these as spam to avoid having them show up, something that I didn't want to do in the first place. Few mailers sure include an 'unsubscribe' link in the email, but they are carefully buried deep inside that one needs to search (see highlight in image below)! 

Given a choice, I would love to hear back from most of the websites, but at a much lesser frequency AND on areas/categories of my interest. Surprisingly, even when you unsubscribe, most websites just have a binary option of 'subscribe/unsubscribe', and don't bother checking if they can retain users by bringing down frequency or categories of notification. There were a handful of professional sites like the McKinsey Quarterly that not only check preferences while you sign up for the first time, but also have helpful options to stay connected sans the clutter. I guess most users would find something like the below page relevant, appealing.. and honest.

Staying on top of your online reads

About 5 years back, I had first set up RSS feeds of my favourite news sites and blogs on Google Reader. It was a nice and simple interface to consume content. That was until Google decided to shut it down, amidst huge uproar from loyal users. After evaluating options, I settled on Feedly, which seemed promising and importantly offered one-click migration, by pulling in all feeds from the Reader. It has served me well the past couple of years, and this post is about how I've organized my Feedly account over time to stay on top of content.

With a limited set of feeds, organizing and reading stuff doesn't need much of thought. As you keep continually adding feeds, things start getting a bit muddled with diverse categories of interest, variety of sources (self-hosted websites, medium, blogger, news sites) and a varying velocity of feed generation - ranging from hundreds every week to an occasional gem-of-a-post.

I started simple with just 2 categories to group all feeds or article sources - 'Headlines' or the not-to-be-missed articles and 'Others', that had everything else. Eventually, my sources grew to over 100 feeds, and 'Headlines' ballooned to over 50. Overwhelmed by this torrent of information, I did some minor re-categorisation which didn't seem to help. I was looking for an optimal mix of categories, while also being able to flag off the 'hot sources' across categories.

Preview of my Feedly panel

Eventually I settled on 7 categories (as shown in the image) to organize the feeds, with each having not more than 15 to 20 feeds each. To maintain sanity, I keep purging sources that doesn't match up with consistent content. Feedly has a super-useful feature of flagging of favourite sources by them as 'promote to Must read', which essentially mirrors the same feeds onto a separate list called 'Must reads'.  This list is again kept at around 15 to 20 feeds and any new additions are always after some removals, to keep it manageable. This workflow has been working well for me, and here are things I like most about Feedly:

1. Good UI with a easy procedure to add & organize content. The feed recommendations are quite relevant too.
2. Clean reading interface with 5 presentation layouts ranging from a mailbox view, cards or an online magazine layout to fast-read stuff. I generally use the 'magazine' layout.
3. Features in the free version are good enough for basic usage, with unlimited feeds & social sharing options bundled.
4. Maintains a 30-day window for articles, after which they get cleared. As opposed to storing content over months or years and getting inundated with scary notifications of thousands of unread articles, I've realized that this time-bounded expiry brings in some reading discipline.

Mission Inbox Zero, and how Google Inbox got me there

Inbox Zero has been the holy grail for email users, more so for technology professionals. Email services have been getting better at cutting clutter over time, starting with showing you the right emails (minus spam), then relevant ones (minus newsletters/updates) and most recently important ones (minus low-priority). These continuous advances notwithstanding, maintaining an uncluttered inbox, leave alone inbox zero, has been a rarity.

I've been following a simple email workflow, that has been reasonably effective to get things done at work. Starting with priority emails, I read and action them, which then becomes 'read'. If I need more time to read or action it later, I keep it 'unread'.  Likewise, if I'm awaiting response or action from others to close loop on an email, I keep those 'unread' too. Several times in a day, I scan the low-priority emails or notifications and keep clearing it. Though this approach has been working for me, it means a *lot* of unread emails and a daily struggle to avoid wasting time on re-scanning known pending actions or not-yet-mature threads.

I have tried some popular email productivity apps such as boxni, gmailmeter, sanebox, followupthen all promising you with tickets to the holy land of 'inbox zero'. However, I found them to be incremental improvements which only take you ahead a couple of steps. Having heard rave reviews about Inbox by Gmail for the past 6 months, I took a look, but was surprised to find it designed against 'time-ingrained, conventional approaches'. Though I didn't drop it completely, I kept avoiding it, until last week when Anand made a gentle but firm push in this direction.

Giving it some serious thought, I've been exploring & trying out this alternative and surprisingly, this seems to solve many of the clutter problems. 

• Inbox doesn't make a major distinction of 'read' vs 'unread' (my fundamental grouse for avoiding it)
• Instead you mark actioned emails as 'done' which get archived (another reason for panic, since I've never archived a single email earlier)
• Any email that you need to read or act later, can be 'snoozed' until then. Similarly, actions pending from others could also be 'snoozed' until you reach a future time or place
• Labels have gotten smarter with 'bundles' where auto-categorised emails are bundled for quicker and bulk action
• Add to that, gamification and smart gestures to swipe and mark 'done', 'snooze' or 'set reminders'.

Inbox, thus forces you to transform your mailbox into a to-do list rather than a carefully curated journal. The past week, I've been on a cleanup mission to do something about the 1000 odd unread emails (300+ high priority!) in my mailbox. Before migrating to Inbox, I had to do a 'purge act' and bring it down to a manageable list to start with. Firstly I archived all my 'read' emails. Considering I had over 20,000 emails in 'actioned' state over the past 5 years, I archived them in bulk, though it took a couple of attempts to get it done.  

I've then been cutting, slashing and burning to bring down the 'unread' count over the past few days. The first 500 was a breeze with easy-to-discard calendar notifications, updates and emails that I shouldn't have really been in. The next 300 started getting slow, with FYI emails and interesting reads, some really dated. The final 200 were the ones that needed real action and hence took a bulk of time. I'm sure quite a few brows would have been raised to hear back from me on long forgotten threads, after months or even years, in a couple of cases. Reaching sub-100 emails, I switched over to Inbox and happily snoozed the future actions and follow-up emails. I quickly setup bundles to improve categorization and added some helpful reminders.

Seeing an inbox with under 30 emails was extremely cathartic, something I haven't achieved in years! Migration to Inbox acted as a good push to get to this state, however staying here needs much more than its cool features. After all, Inbox zero is not exactly about having zero emails, but an ongoing sensible philosophy of email management, to ensure that emails which are just a means to get work done don't eat up too much of your time. Instead, you must be able to reserve a bulk of your time & attention for getting creative and productive work done.