#1600: HeaderShedder

Today’s invention is a productivity tool, based on my belief that much of the difficulty with ‘information overload’ is to do with the look of the dreaded Inbox.

Subject lines are meant to allow you to prioritise your reading, but in fact I’ve noticed that I tend to delay opening anything marked ‘Urgent meeting request’ or ‘Our response to your proposal’ or ‘Any news on the report?.’

Today’s invention is an email program which replaces the Subject line by a set of ASCII characters.

When the Inbox is viewed as a list, no Subjects are visible, but the whole thing takes on the appearance of ASCII Art. Every time an email has been dealt with, the Inbox list view updates to show a new image.

Messages are thus less discouraging and they might as well be opened in inbox order, thus lessening the procrastination which subject headers create.