How many emails should I process today?
So you have come back from holidays, and 152 emails await in your inbox. Of course a few of them are urgent but you definitely don't want to process all at once when only 20 come per day on average. How many should you read today? This script will tell you.
If you ask it every day it learns about your daily charge and instructs you to read as many that
- you don't get overwhelmed (more than usually) on any particular day, not even after holidays;
- nevertheless your inbox keeps a bounded size.
The algorithm is simple: if the number of emails decreased by 5% since yesterday then the script is happy, and keeps your daily load constant. If it decreased less, or even increased, then it increases your daily load but only by 4% at most. If the decrease is more than 5% than we are even happier and the script decreases the daily load but at most by 2% (this is rather strict).
First open a terminal and type in
a4t -i [task name]
where [task name] can be e.g. "myemails". This will create a ~/.a4t directory and puts in it some log files about your task. To ask the script about today's aim, type
a4t [task name]
and type in how many emails you have now. The script then tells you your goal for today. Try to achieve that and, when asked, proudly enter where you have just ended up with your task.
a4t -d [task name]
can use a directory count instead of manual entry of the number of emails, handy if you use maildir. Once the task is initialised with the -i option, invoke -d on the next run and the script will ask you to enter the directory which then will be remembered later.
If you have a home/.hrut/hrut.pkl file, see my repo hrut for details, then a4t will factor in that recommendation.
If you have Gnuplot installed, then plot_a4t gives you a graphical feedback on how the quantity of this task evolved in time.
I'm no programmer, so please don't blame me on the quality of the code. :-) Licensed under GNU GPLv3.