Finis Price (TechnoEsq) says:

a study done by Dr. Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University in England, found that “it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train if thought after interruption by email…So people who check their email every five minutes waste 8.5 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.” While most people claim to check their email every 15 minutes, when actually studied, the average user actually checked their email every five minutes.

I have to say that I very rarely “check” my email. I look for the red badge to show up, and if there’s an unread email, I tend to it. I admit that it probably does take me a few seconds/minutes to get back on track.  However, I gave up on using Growl for Mail.app notifications, and instead, now use Mail.appetizer.

I am a huge fan of Mail.appetizer. It’s advantage over GrowlMail is simple: you can actually perform actions from the notification window. Oh, and like Growl and GrowlMail it’s free.

When an email comes in, you can preview as much of the email as you wish by resizing the window. Once you know what it is, you can do something (or nothing) with the email. By clicking the “x” button (bottom-left), you simply send the notification away. By clicking the delete button, you can actually delete the email without even bringing the Mail.app to focus. By clicking the magnifying-glass button, your Mail program comes to focus with that particular email selected for viewing. Finally, if you don’t want to switch to Mail.app, but you’ve gotten the gist of the email from the notification window, and you don’t need to leave it in “unread” status, you can click the checkmark button and it will mark the email as “read” without switching to Mail.app. This is beautiful if you are like me and go bonkers if there are unread messages staring you in the face with that nasty red badge. 

I suppose, as an alternative, I could take MacSparky’s approach and turn off all notifications – but I ain’t there yet. I like to know when emails come in. Sometimes, particular clients need immediate attention, and sometimes, minutes can matter.

Ultimately Mail.appetizer saves me time and enables me to be more efficient than if I was using GrowlMail or nothing at all.

TechnoEsq often runs across new legal and legal-related blogs on the
Internet, however it is rare that we find one which captures our
attention within the first month of launch. Esquire Mac is one of those rare legal blogs.

* * *

His blog has delivered early on its promise to present tips, tricks,
reviews and musings about using Macs in a small law office and has
already shown us a few programs we have never seen before in the short
time the blog has been running. Keep an eye on this legal blog, you
will be glad you did!

Thanks for the good word, Finis! I was truly honored and humbled to read his post this weekend. Check the full post here.

By the way, in case you haven’t checked out my About page, Finis and TechnoEsq are/were a significant source of inspiration for this blog.