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Earn points for checking your email
As a business professional, you probably get a lot of emails. Whether you check them as they come in or you wait until you go into work the next morning, your emails can pile up and your inbox can become crammed with both read and unread emails. And as you know from your childhood, when tedious chores are made into a game, it can be easier to get tasks completed. The same is true with your overflowing email inbox. With this in mind, Baydin, which is in the 2011 class of 500 Startups created The Email Game.
The Email Game is a simple beat-the-clock game. The main point of The Email Game is to earn as many points as possible. You’re given a certain amount of time—depending on the number of emails that need to be sorted—and seven action options for each email, including reply, reply all, forward, label, boomerang, skip, archive, and delete. Every time you sort or delete an email before your timer reaches zero, you are awarded points. If you choose to reply to the email, an additional three minutes is added to your clock. If you’re unsure about what to do with an email or two, you can choose to boomerang it. This will archive the email and bring it back into your inbox later.
The only option that doesn’t get you points is skipping a message. If you need to respond to an email, but you need more time than three minutes, you have the option to add additional time to your timer. Or, you can use your three minutes to get as far as you can and click on the send later option, all while building your points.
While The Email Game can be fun and a bit of a challenge, it really does have professional benefits. For starters, you’ll feel like you’re having fun while you’re actually being productive and relieving some stress. Using The Email Game will help you get through your emails quickly, which will free up some of your time. You can then use that free time for perhaps-less-fun things like business meetings or performance reviews. But if you can look forward to those ten minutes of sorting through your emails against a ticking timer each day, it just might make the whole workday worth it.
The American Genius Staff Writer: Charlene Jimenez earned her Master's Degree in Arts and Culture with a Creative Writing concentration from the University of Denver after earning her Bachelor's Degree in English from Brigham Young University in Idaho. Jimenez's column is dedicated to business and technology tips, trends and best practices for entrepreneurs and small business professionals.
