Decaying Relevancy:  Imagine all incoming email has a “freshness” date.  It came in X time ago.  That email is either read or unread.  There’s quite a bit of intelligence in these two dimensions.  Email I care about will be read while fresh.  Email I drudge through — or that is complex — will be read and stale.  Email that is unread and stale is useless.  That leaves fresh unread email.  That’s what I really care about making sense of.

Sender Benchmarking:  Now is when it gets interesting.  Imagine that I know, for each sender, a distribution on read/unread and freshness.   That distribution is going to tell a lot — some shapes will be fat-headed, where 80% of the emails I read right away.  Some will be fat-tailed — where I read very few of them right away.  Based on these distributions, I can start to categorize and prioritize my email (or rather, it can be done adaptively based on my normal interaction with email).

Behavioral Conclusion:  The last area that rounds out my adaptive email system is what happens with the read email.  My biggest problem with work email is actually read mail that is sitting in my inbox.  I either need to reply, archive, or take other action.  The first two conclusions are part of my normal email workflow.  Adding a follow-up action usually puts an email in purgatory.  This is where the freshness comes in.

Bringing It All Together

So my problems fall out as follows:

1. Unread important email
2. Read, non-concluded, important email
3. Read, non-concluded, unimportant email
4. Unread, unimportant email

The key unknown is importance.  Using sender distributions — I can determine importance as a function of freshness.  Adding behavioral conclusion to the freshness metrics, we now can calculate % of items read and % concluded per sender.  We can also weight these by the time it takes to do both of those.

By creating benchmarks/norms, each email can be given an importance rating.  High importance items, with longer times in the unread and/or non-concluded buckets, receive the highest priority.   Just by organizing my email inbox into unread-important and a read-non-concluded views, prioritized by freshness, I know I’d be quite a bit more productive.

Other interesting by-products could be a way to score how productive you are by day/daypart.  You could also create a feedback mechanism to people you interact with via email — how important their emails are to you.  Finally, you could break apart a senders importance distribution to allow them to explicitly rank a message on how important they think it is.  Their rating could then be matched to how your emergent system rates it — and productive feedback loops could ensue.

With the baby boomers aging into the retired and elderly phases of life I think about the pickle jar.  How many objects don’t have elderly-friendly affordances?  The old-time canning jar (and versions of it like the pickle, olive, etc) hasn’t progressed much.  They are innovating around refrigerator boxes of beer and soda, beer bottles that supposedly make the beer taste better, easy flow ketchup, etc.  But what about making it easier to for people who it isn’t easy for?

I bet my grandmother started to select food items at the grocery store she knew she could open.  As much as she loved pickles, I bet she stopped buying them.

As any parent knows, another big packaging issue is toys.  So many boxes are impossible to open (and this extends to many products that require knives to break through the plastic shell).  And then the toy itself is fastened with plastic coated metal twist ties.  Tens of them.  Not only is it a pain to open — you’ve got all these choke hazards lying around.

Instead of innovating around package design to either stand out or increase consumption — why not focus some effort on facilitating use in the first place.  Innovate around your product affordances… create them or make them better.

Evidence Exhibit A (weak)

Evidence Exhibit B (no science — but makes sense)

Evidence Exhibit C (getting closer):

Still, dance boosts mood more than does exercise alone. In a study at the University of London, researchers assigned patients with anxiety disorders to spend time in one of four therapeutic settings: a modern-dance class, an exercise class, a music class, or a math class. Only the dance class significantly reduced anxiety.

Evidence Exhibit D (seems like the real deal)

A quick example:  I would contend Ebert thinks some commercial films (and books) are works of art.

I allow Sangtiago the last word. Toward the end of her presentation, she shows a visual with six circles, which represent, I gather, the components now forming for her brave new world of video games as art. The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management. I rest my case.

Why is he selectively ignoring the fact that any film studio or publisher has business structures like the above?

Most unsettling, and perhaps most demonstrative of his antiquated view, is the feeling that I think his main problem is that “players” control the narrative of the game.  He makes faulty logical arguments.  In the end he stands on taste.  And Ebert, stick to the movies, you’ve got a better sense of taste there.

P.S.  I usually like (even if I don’t agree with) his points of view.  This kind of article just makes him seem irrelevant.

Chicago Tribune

This is very cool.  Need to get some expert training and validation on the tastes.  Not sure I’m properly tuned to them all.

Hat tip TAB.