Murmurs

More than once I’ve tried to be more productive during a working day by limiting the times of the day that I check and respond to emails. I first came across this idea in the book The 4 hour work week and again in Do it Tomorrow.

I’ve tried working with having only certain times of the day when I check my email. It works for a day or so but I usually fail to keep going for any number of reasons such as meetings, phone calls (because I didn’t respond to an email) or even my own habit of opening up my mail without even thinking.

I wondered if the idea was right but that I was trying to enforce it at the wrong times. Rather than trying multiple different time periods I wrote a PHP script to monitor my email usage, watching the times that people email me and watching the times I email other people.

Using a graph of the hours of the day, I was hoping I might see one or more times a day that there was a natural lul in email activity that I could use to work away without checking emails. Looking at the graph there are little dips near lunch and after 5 but no obvious spots during a working day where I could have an uninterrupted work period.

In that graph it shows some emails coming in at odd hours. These are my own automated emails which email me when someone has reached this blog after searching Google. It shows me the search term used. Other than this, I keep other automated emails to another account.

1,365 emails coming in during November works out at about 45 per day or 68 per working day.

427 emails being sent by me in November works out at 14 per day or 21 per working day. I thought it would have been more.

Some day I must look at the amount of text in these emails to work out the average time it takes for me to read and write the emails.

So starting in December I decided to start work a little earlier and see if I could get a few things done before the emails and phone calls get going.

My new habit is getting up at 6am and getting straight to work from home. Luckily my coffee machine has a timer so I can have a pot of coffee ready and piping hot when I wander into the kitchen in the dark.

For a week or so now I’ve been working 6am to 10am without checking my email or answering the phone during that time. I have set my email client (Thunderbird) not to check mails on start-up because I often need to open it to refer to older mails and its calendar without getting new mail.

It’s just less than 4 hours of incredibly productive time. I then head in to the office in The Rubicon where I work the rest of my day where emails, phone calls and meetings can happen.

The PHP script for monitoring the emails

To monitor my outgoing emails, I edited the settings in ‘Copies and Folders’ in the Thunderbird account settings. There is an option there to automatically Bcc an outgoing email.

To monitor my incoming emails, I added an email address to a ‘Forward list’ in the email address settings in the Blacknight control panel.

I then wrote a PHP script to open a connection to both incoming and outgoing email addresses every half hour using Cron. The script opens a POP3 connection, reads in the headers of each of the incoming and outgoing emails to a mysql database and then deletes them.

The information stored to the database are the To field, From field, a copy of the headers and the date/time.

Having copies of the incoming and outgoing emails in this way allows me to interact with my usual email without the scheduled script from missing any emails to record information from.

Another PHP script reads in the incoming email information from the database for each month and creates a bar chart using the Google Chart API.

Here are the main points from the PHP script which reads in the email headers from the server.

Open a connection to the server: (Where SERVER_ADDRESS is your email host address)

$mbox = imap_open(”{SERVER_ADDRESS:110/pop3}”, “$username”, “$password”);

Collect the headers in the inbox currently:

$headers = imap_headers($mbox);

Loop through the headers:

foreach ($headers as $val) {

Get a specific email header

$email_headers=addslashes(imap_fetchheader($mbox, $count));

Pull out some specific information, the ‘To’ field using a regular expression:

preg_match($pattern, $email_headers, $matches);
$email_to = str_replace(”To: “,”", $matches[0]);
$pattern = “/to: (.+)+/i”;

Get the ‘from’ field:

$pattern = “/from: (.+)+/i”;
preg_match($pattern, $email_headers, $matches);
$email_from = addslashes(str_replace(”From: “,”", $matches[0]));

Pull out any other information needed such as the date received or the email client used and then save to a database table.

Label the email to be deleted:

imap_delete($mbox, $count);

End the loop through the headers:

}

Delete the marked emails and close the connection:

imap_expunge($mbox);
imap_close($mbox);

Send me a comment below if you would like me to email you the entire script to connect PHP to a POP3 mailbox, save the headers and display a bar chart using the Google Chart API. The code is a bit much to copy here.