Gmail Meter

Wed, 1 Aug 2012
2 min read
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So I’ve been using Gmail Meter on my work account for a couple of months now because I’ve always been interested to know how and whether email at work is used efficiently.

I don’t have any conclusive data (because I’ve not been actively tracking things!), but I thought I’d share some interesting statistics which recur every month, without fail (the graphs and pie chart I’m using are from July 2012, BTW):

Daily Email Traffic
Daily Email Traffic
  • From the visual above, most email is sent in the morning and just before lunch.
  • People enter the office after lunch and try to send a bit of email but they’ve more or less cleared their quota for the day.
  • Work is still done in the evening, after dinner. Work-life balance, anyone?
Monthly Email Traffic
Monthly Email Traffic
  • LOOK AT THOSE PEAKS! The most emails are sent at the start of the week, on Mondays.
  • Thankfully not a lot of traffic on weekends, though you can see some traffic from me last weekend – I was clearing stuff in preparation for the surgery I underwent on Monday.
Email Categories
Email Categories

Last but not least, most email messages I get are not exactly… relevant to me. Either that or I don’t like storing a lot of mail in my inbox.

QLRS: On the Subject of Race

Tue, 31 Jul 2012
1 min read
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Malay Sketches by Alfian Sa'at

My review of Alfian Sa’at’s Malay Sketches is now up on the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS).

On the Subject of Race
Alfian Sa’at sketches what it is like to be Malay in Singapore

 

Henry   Do you know what you can say? To a black man. On the subject of race.
Charles   “Nothing.”
Henry   That is correct.

– David Mamet, Race, Samuel French: New York, 2010.

 

Two years ago, a couple of friends and I watched the premiere of Charged by Chong Tze Chien, a play with a National Service setting that explores tensions between the Malay and Chinese communities in Singapore.

Those I watched the play with were ethnic Chinese Singaporean, English-educated professionals with an upper-middle/lower-upper class background. I am an ethnically mixed (Chinese-Indian), English-educated professional with a middle-class background.

When the play ended, I exited the theatre with this unspoken sentiment: This was a great play that more ethnic Chinese Singaporean people need to watch so that they know how minorities in Singapore feel. And true enough, my friends had this to say collectively when we discussed the production over drinks: This was a great play – and we didn’t know Singaporean Malays felt that way.

 
(continued…)

Keep truffling.

Mon, 2 Jul 2012
1 min read
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“Well,” said Pooh, “we keep looking for Home and not finding it, so I thought that if we looked for this Pit, we’d be sure not to find it, which would be a Good Thing, because then we might find something that we weren’t looking for, which might be just what we were looking for, really.

From “In which Tigger is unbounced”, in The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne.

Piglet and Pooh.