The Noisy Channel

Just read this article citing a number of studies to the effect that email is a major productivity drain. Nothing surprising to me–a lot of us have learned the hard way that the only way to be productive is to not check email constantly.

But I am curious if anyone has made progress on tools that alert you to emails that do call for immediate attention. I’m personally a fan of attention bonds approaches, but I imagine that the machine learning folks have at least thought about this as a sort of inverse spam filtering problem.