Other than face-to-face conversation or a phone call, e-mail is probably one of the quickest ways to get in touch with someone. For some of us, it’s our main method of communication, and the faster it is, the better. But no matter how good our intentions, there’s always some reason why we just can’t get around to replying right now. But there’s hope.

Gmail’s app interface does a good job at informing us about message timings, but a Firefox add-on called Reply Now just made it even more time-conscious. Reply Now changes the information of when an email was received from the usual “Date & Time”, to relative time stamps.

What are relative time stamps, you ask? It’s basically a clock ticking off the number of minutes or hours after an action happened. In this add-on’s case, it counts how many minutes or hours ago since an email message was received. The perfect way to stop you prevaricating and get you to reply promptly to your messages.

Here’s an example of the original Gmail inbox format. The dates are listed right beside each email item.

If you have Reply Now installed, the dates will change to relative time stamps (i.e, 3 hours ago, 7 days ago).

This add-on is definitely for the time conscious who wants to keep track of any unanswered emails. Or maybe even for those of us who are terrible procrastinators? Time stamps turn yellow after 15 minutes and red after an hour.