I’m pretty rubbish at responding to emails - I’ve tried inbox zero a few times but never stuck at it. I thought being public about the state of my inbox might encourage me to keep on top of things.
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(key: orange - unread, yellow - read)
It’s updated every 30 minutes by a short python script that uses the new gmail api to fetch the inbox counts, then post them at a heroku app. The heroku app stores the data in Redis. The server is slightly hacked together, though the source is on github.
I guess you could say that it’s a slight invasion of my privacy - though I think the benefits of having it open far outweigh that. It forces to be honest about my inbox, helps other people see if I’m making progress, or spot patterns and help me.
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If you are doing some more heavy duty time series monitoring, I’d check out influxDB - seems like a really powerful tool.
I couldn’t use it for this data, but redis-timeseries is a nice node library for storing event counts in redis (like website hits or other events).