This amusing app analyses your email

An amusing new app from Xerox analyzes your emails and calendar entries to identify those distractions that keep you away from your real job.

The Microsoft Windows app securely synthesizes data from your Microsoft Outlook account. Then using interactive visuals and humorous comments, it outlines by day, week and month, the activities, people, events and vocabulary that fill your inbox.

When I read about the “Business of your Brain” app in the Employee Benefit News blog Daily Diversion, I decided to download it and give it a road test. Here’s what it told me about my own email and calendar based on the month of July:

Are you starting to dress alike yet? I appear to have spent more time in meetings with my husband Joel than anyone else. That’s because whenever one of us sets up a social engagement we send the other person an Outlook invitation to ensure the event is in both of our calendars.

We hope no real business is being missed: I have both received and ignored more messages from the CNW Portfolio System than any other source. CNW is a news wire service that sends dozens of emails a day which I direct to a separate folder. I only open and read the press releases that appear relevant to my business.

Short and sweet: My sister is “lord of the two word email.”

Does she work here anymore? I got the most out of office messages from a fellow moneyville blogger who is on vacation.

Motor mouth: The largest number of messages over 300 characters came from Google. This is not surprising, since I have daily google searches running for news stories and blog items using the keywords “pensions,” “health” and “compensation.”

Added stress: An employee of one of my corporate clients sent out the most high alert messages and copied in dozens of people.

Did I learn anything? Not really, but I had a good laugh when my husband was tagged as my “meeting buddy.” Will I do anything differently as a result of what I found out? Probably not, but downloading the app and looking at results for different time periods gave me a much-needed break at the end of a very busy day.

If you want to give it a try, you can download the app from here. You may learn something about your own questionable email habits or those of your colleagues that if corrected, could give you more time to focus on paid work.

Also see: Ten ways to cut down on email clutter and 10 must have free apps for your tablet .