Does Priority Inbox save 15% of your time?

Three months have passed since the introduction of the Priority Inbox feature to automatically sort important emails.

The Gmail team calls statistics that users who activated Priority Inbox, work with mail 15% less time than other users. At the same time, with “important” (obviously, according to the algorithms), they work 43% more time by mail.

This statistic can be believed or not. If you believe, then you have to recognize the next triumph of computer algorithms over the human will. Indeed, it becomes beneficial for a person to blindly trust an algorithm without even knowing it.

On the other hand, statistics from Google can be easily challenged. We can say that the feature of Priority Inbox is activated by those people who have previously worked with mail less than average. Those professionals who read hundreds of letters a day and respond to dozens of them, while they are afraid to miss something important, in no way activated Priority Inbox. No wonder they spend an average of 15% more time reading mail than other users.
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One way or another, Google considers the above statistics successful and continues to improve Priority Inbox. Today they presented a new little feature. Now when you hover over the importance icon ( ) a brief hint is displayed explaining why this letter is important. There are at least three options: 1) because you yourself marked the letter as important; 2) mainly because of the people participating in the conversation; 3) mainly because of the words in the message.





In addition, user reviews were such that the feature did not respond quickly enough to manual training, so the developers now significantly increased user feedback factors. They promise that the system will learn much faster.