Digital Mirror examines your email folders for evidence of meetings, as well as determining volumes and lengths of email messages. (Unsurprisingly, longer email messages count as greater evidence of time spent than do shorter ones.) Everyone you deal with is assigned a score, based on meetings you appeared to attend with them and email you sent to them. This version of Digital Mirror then displays how you divided your Quality Time among up to five people each month.

A problem employee or customer, for example, can take up a lot of your valuable time as you deal with the various problems they present. Digital Mirror detects this expenditure of time and effort, whether or not you like the individual concerned.

The number of people with whom you spend Quality Time may vary from month to month. This version of Digital Mirror shows these people, up to a maximum of five each month. We expect to remove this restriction in some future versions of the software.

In this version of Digital Mirror, we select no more than five people for display during each time period. And our criteria for choosing which five may be different from yours. From your email data, we try to detect who you have met with. We also factor in email messages, especially long ones, which are more likely to have taken a long time to write. For each month, we select the top five people and display how you divided your quality time among them.

Some reasons why this approach may omit someone you feel you spend a lot of quality time with are:

• Little evidence in email folders of meetings (perhaps you tend to hang out with this person informally, without setting up meetings or referring to them in emails)
• You generally communicate with them in other ways than email communications (in person, by phone, via instant messaging)
• Based on the evidence Digital Mirror, there are at least five other people with whom you spend more quality time during any given month.

Digital Mirror analyzes the language in your emails, looking for indications that you met, or planned to meet, with someone - "It was good to meet with you" or "We should get together," for example. It uses such indicators to determine who, in all likelihood, you have spent time with.

Parts of the timeline at the top of the visualization may be colored yellow. This means that no data from the indicated period was used in this visualization. This version of Digital Mirror shows only a limited amount of information, so it is quite possible relevant data was found for this time, but is not being shown. (The timeline animation runs at higher speed through the yellow-colored regions.)

If you are running Digital Mirror on personal data, please note that this version is optimized for analysis of data in a work or other organizational context. For personal data, it is possible that you may find some of the results less interesting or relevant.

Even if that is not the case, people are sometimes puzzled by the results Digital Mirror presents. But these results are firmly based on the data: if you see something unexpected, it is likely to be because your data suggests something different than your perception. We strongly recommend that you look into the data yourself. In many cases, you can do this by clicking on the specific result in the visualization to bring up an evidence panel that shows some examples that led to the conclusion. In our experience, in the vast majority of cases, the data will support the Digital Mirror result. The challenge is to see yourself as Digital Mirror and others see you. If you have tried and still believe the result is wrong, please let us know.

When we need to communicate with someone in another time zone, especially a remote one, we often resort to emails, which may be long and detailed. Long emails are one of the elements Digital Mirror detects to identify quality time. (Such emails tend to take a lot of time – quality time – to compose, after all.) So, if you exchange a lot of long emails with someone in a remote time zone, that person may well show up here.

Digital Mirror is designed to create a reasonably wide range of visualizations, not all of which will be applicable to everyone. It is quite likely that, for any individual user, there will not be enough relevant data for every single visualization. This is normal, which is why we provide a sample for you to enjoy!