My New Friend Xobni

Xobni (for you wordplay lovers that’s "inbox" spelled backwards) is my new best productivity booster! I have not been this excited about a program for a while.

Xobni works with Outlook to help organize and search emails. The program crates profiles for each person who emails me. The profiles contain relationship statistics, contact information (it automatically pulls phone numbers directly out of emails), social connections to other people that email me, threaded conversations, and attachments.

The program is incredibly intuitive to use and I find myself using it all the time. A while ago I committed myself to an inbox zero philosophy. But filing all my emails into hierarchical file folder systems seemed soooo 2005, not to mention it was HUGE time waster.

Now every email gets filed into just one folder in Outlook and Xobni does the rest. The search feature is people-based and extremely fast. When I perform a search in Xobni it simultaneously searches all my data and gives me precise and accurate results.

Now I just perform a simple search of a person’s name and I get their contact information, stats on how often I send or receive emails from them (really learn how much you pester other people with endless emails), several email threads, and attachments that can be opened directly from Xobni.

It also has some really cool analytic (albeit simplistic) features that can help you see when you’re receiving and sending the most emails daily, weekly, monthly, or annually.

I purposefully only check email three times a day. After looking at Xobni I could see that the bulk of my daily emails come regularly at three different times. I began checking my email regularly right after those three time periods. The result? My response times have gone way up even though I’m not spending more time checking email than I was previously.

Xobni is in beta, invite only for now. I have five invitations left for any Outlook users who want to give it a test drive (let me know in the comments). I’ve included their live demo below for more information.