Help Required in formulating my Gmail ~0 Goal

Newbee
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I have many filters in Gmail and my emails per day get distributed across different labels and skips Inbox too.

  1. What’s the difference between Beeminding “unread” vs “read” emails? Why would I have to set a goal to read X emails per day or (X * Y total emails if I have a target date)?

  2. Can I use beeminder to stay top of my email by having a rule that says at lowest point in day (in 24 hours), the number of unread (is:unread) emails should be less 10?

  3. Can I have the rule 2 repeated everyday?

Please help me formulate this goal properly with GmailZero. I’ve been trying to get this right, but I feel, I am missing something

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  1. Broadly speaking, a Gmail goal runs a query on your account and returns the number of messages that match that query. The lowest value in a given day is that day’s datapoint.

A query can be anything that you would use to find the messages in Gmail. For instance, if you want to track all unread emails, you’d say “is:unread.” If you wanted to find all emails labeled “todo,” you’d say “label:todo.” For emails with a yellow star, you could say “has:yellow-star.” You can also use Booleans to combine these - so “is:unread AND label:todo” would find only the unread emails labeled “todo.” You can try out different options using the search bar in Gmail itself to see how many messages a given query returns.

To set up a query other than the default, which counts messages in your inbox marked as “read”, you would go to the goal page, choose Settings > Gmail Query, and enter the new query you’d like to use. The last time I tried to do this, I encountered some problems, but a quick email to support@beeminder.com straightened things out for me. If all else fails, let them know exactly what you’re trying to do and they can help you get set up correctly.

  1. and 3) Beeminder lets you set up the rate and handles it automatically. Once you’ve decide on your query, determine the rate of change. For instance, if you want to decrease the total by 10 every day, you’d go to the “commitment” tab, and in the “Commit to” section, you’d enter “10 per day.” Once you click update, the graph will adjust. Again, if you encounter problems getting things set up how you’d like, support will be happy to help.

If you get your inbox cleared out but want to keep tracking, you can set it flat at “0 per day” - that will keep checking that you’re on track, but not require you to change anything beyond that point.

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Thanks @gretchen.

I understood the first three paragraphs of your response completely.

I have some basic questions on how beeminder works w.r.t to email.

When I am setting up my goal like (As an example)

  1. What does this Commit to mean?

Screenshot 2017-01-03 21.43.06.png1896×614 26.1 KB

  1. When given this query like is:read in the Gmail Query.

In the diagram 1), the 0 msg per day is automatically controlled and it varies when I change Goal Date, Goal Total. I am trying to to understand the relationship.

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The commit to you’re showing in the picture means that you will have 100 or less messages by 1/4/2017 (tomorrow). You can set any two of these three fields, and the third will be calculated automatically.

For instance: Let’s say your query is “is:read” and you have 100 read messages right now. You’d like to get that to 0 messages by the end of the month. To do this, you’d put Goal Date at 2017-01-31 and Goal Total at 0. Messages per day will be calculated automatically.

Another example: If you have 1000 read messages and just want to reduce by 10 each day until they’re gone, you’d set Goal Total to 0 and Messages per day to 10. Goal date is calculated automatically.

Finally, let’s say you’ve already cleared out your read messages and just want to keep them under control until the end of the year. You’d set Goal rate at 0 (a flat graph) and Goal Date at 2017-12-31.

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Thanks for your responses, @gretchen.