# Thirty-seven unread items is now the University's ceiling

> A School of Continuous Improvement impact report follows five years of household unread-badge surveys into a University ceiling on what any staff inbox, pigeonhole or noticeboard may hold unread.

No staff inbox, pigeonhole or noticeboard at the University may now hold more than thirty-seven unread items. _The median household carries thirty-seven unread items_, the School of Continuous Improvement's Impact Report 2021--2026, released today by Dr Mirela Hanke with Dr Osei Vandermeer, traces how a figure first returned by a household survey became the figure of record for the University's own correspondence.

> A number is easier to keep than to explain, and we have tried to do both for five years.
>
> --- Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Living Dashboard

The report draws together eleven waves of a survey that asked households what their most-used messaging app's badge was showing, reporting each wave by decile and giving the app's own display limit its own place in the picture. It follows that distribution into the Living Dashboard, into collaborators' sampling frames and trays, and into the Registry's nightly archive, where any surplus above the ceiling is set aside unread, oldest first. Later household medians sit in the Indicator Commons beside the ceiling and have been recorded rather than applied.

The University is content to have one of its smallest rules rest on one of its widest surveys. Dr Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory, said the review calendar had closed each cycle in the same way, "which is a comfort to whoever keeps a calendar".

The full report is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.pjfbqd.