Email Time Tracking
Email is where hours go to disappear. Email Tracking makes it a visible, measured part of your day: how long each message took, how quickly you responded, and what kind of email it was — so you can decide what to batch, delegate, or ignore.
Open Email Tracking in the TimeCampus navigation at app.timecampus.com. Analytics live at Email Tracking → Analytics and preferences at Email Tracking → Settings.
What is measured
Each email time entry records the effort an email cost you:
| Field | What it captures |
|---|---|
| Subject, sender, recipients | Enough context to recognise the message and its thread |
| Duration | Time spent reading and responding |
| Response time | How long the message waited before you answered |
| Category | What the email was about — used for the breakdowns |
| Thread | Groups related messages so a long back-and-forth is visible as one cost |
| Importance | Flag the messages that actually mattered |
Entries can be added one at a time or imported in bulk from a sync, and you can filter the list by thread or importance to see where a specific conversation's time went.
What is not measured: TimeCampus is not email surveillance. It records how much time email cost you — it does not read, analyse, or store message bodies, and nobody gets a feed of your correspondence. See Privacy below.
The Email Tracking page
The main page lists your per-email entries with their duration, response time, category, and importance, plus filters to narrow by thread or importance. Use it to:
- Spot the threads that quietly consumed an afternoon
- Check whether "quick replies" are actually quick
- Attribute email effort to the client work it belongs to
Email Tracking → Analytics
The analytics view rolls your entries up:
| Metric | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Emails today | How many messages you handled |
| Time on email | Total email time for the period |
| Average response | Your typical response time, in minutes |
| Email score | The share of handled email you flagged as important — a signal-to-noise measure |
Stats can be scoped to a date range, with per-category breakdowns, so you can compare weeks and see whether batching your inbox actually reduced the cost.
Email Tracking → Settings
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Auto-track emails | Automatically track time spent reading and responding |
| Categorize by project | Link email time to the right project automatically |
| Response time alerts | Notify you when a response time exceeds your threshold (off by default) |
As everywhere in TimeCampus, capture is user-controlled — turn off what you don't want measured.
Email on the Timeline
Email time flows into your Timeline as part of the communication slice of your day. That's the point: email stops being invisible overhead and shows up next to meetings and deep work, so your focus ratio and daily picture are honest. Consultants can carry that attributed email time through to billable reporting.
Live mailbox sync — an always-on email channel that feeds entries continuously — is part of the channels roadmap. Today, entries arrive via bulk import from a sync, connected channels, or manual entry. See Channels.
Privacy
- No content-reading. TimeCampus measures time spent, not what was written. Message bodies are never captured.
- Your data, your controls. Capture settings are yours; retention and deletion are covered by data controls.
- Aggregate for teams. No manager view exists of your individual inbox behaviour; team analytics only ever see aggregates. See the privacy model.
Using the insight
- A rising time on email trend with a flat important-ratio usually means noise is growing — unsubscribe, filter, or batch.
- If your average response time is far below any reasonable expectation, you may be interrupting deep work to answer instantly. Check the effect on your focus score.
- Long threads with high total duration are candidates for a meeting — and you can weigh that trade-off honestly with meeting cost.