Many years ago when gmail was just launched in beta, my first email was the welcome email from Google. Over time I had an inbox in the thousands. In the last few years I tried to get to 0 again, but failed. Now I have learned about GTD and also a thing our two from The Behavioral Science Guys, so I decided to actually track my, uhm, progress publicly.
PS: This is done by having a Google Script write to a Google Spreadsheet that generates a public Google Spreadsheet Chart. Here is the code:
function WriteInboxCountToSpreadSheet() { var ss = SpreadsheetApp.openById("TheCodePartFromTheSpreadsheetUrlHere"); var sheet = ss.getSheets()[0]; sheet.appendRow([Utilities.formatDate(new Date(), "Europe/Amsterdam", "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"), MyGmailInboxCount()]); }
Oh gosh, 5 days of not opening my email and poof: almost 300!
Google limits the results of GmailApp.getInboxThreads(), so I had to page the counter:
PS: I tried to change the increment, but there was little difference between 100 (19401ms) and 500 (17474ms), so to be future ready, I put it at 100. Note: 10 did cause a much bigger execution time (102175ms) on a 400+ inbox.