One of the nice things about working alongside 1,500 other bloggers is that if you let a thought go unblogged for too long, someone else will pick up the slack. For example: OneNote tells me that I created the page “Getting to ZBB in your inbox” in my “To Blog” section on Tuesday, June 14, 2005 at 5:20 PM. Then life happened, I never got around to fleshing out the idea, and Dan Fernandez beat me to it :) Now Omar Shahine has chimed in with a “me too!”, so I’m not even the first to say “oh, I forgot to blog that thought…”

Anyway, the analogy goes like this:

• Zero Bug Bounce (ZBB) is when your team has no bugs older than n days, for some small n. It’s a “bounce” because you will always find new bugs later on — the count goes down to zero and then rises again. Nonetheless, it’s a good state to be in, if only for a brief instant, and Microsoft teams will “drive to ZBB” before shipping.
• Zero Email Bounce (ZEB) is when your inbox has no emails older than n days, for some small n. It’s a “bounce” because you will always receive new emails later on — the count goes down to zero, and then rises again. Nonetheless, it’s a good state to be in, if only for a brief instant (and maybe Microsoft developers should “drive to ZEB” every day?).

If you want to learn more, Dan describes how to create an Outlook search folder to track your ZEB, and Omar describes how it matches with the Getting Things Done methodology.

Zero Email Bounce. It’s good for the soul. You heard it here first second third.

Update: Heather Leigh describes ZEB as “email nirvana”… :)