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The other day I decided to inbox zero. Why? Not because I’m a huge GTD nut, but I’ve always hated email, mostly because it is inefficent, miscommunication prone, and one way. When you click send your message could be filtered,
spamboxed, bounced, ghosted, ignored, fumbled or at worst received and replied. Even people who do business over email are bad at it, responding cryptically or lacking key information. People will slur out a response at 10PM on their iphone out of duty or even out of a desire to appear hard working. There is just a lot of latency and potential to get sideways.
The funny thing is that over on techcrunch.com every day I see some messaging startup aiming to be the “Email killer”. Cuz email sucks, everybody knows that (just deals with it). If not, then it is some addon Frankenstein like Smartr (sorry Xnobi), which just accepts the inevitability of email, and layers SAAS on top of it. Google Apps has carried email out of the dark ages, but it will be a minute before it sees the rapture. For example, email was invented in 1971. Yup, odds are email is much older than you. When you have 40+ years of human history in a system it is a tad difficult to overcome. I don’t care how much Venture Capital you have. So instead we have this graceful evolution away from email into things like Facebook messages, Twitter etc but no major progress. Even Google attempted to slay the dragon but failed with Wave.
Email can be pretty damn attractive. It’s lightweight, low bandwith, easily automated, relatively secure, decent privacy controls, stupid simple, and universally accepted. Those last two are the cornerstones. Any successful communication startup has them. Email excels at certain things. Mostly confirmations, notifications and simple 1:1 conversations. I was taught more than 3 RE: and pick up the phone. It works well but what to do when all these little streams of notifications add up into a torrent of noise? Across all my accounts including my personal Gmail, I get approx 100-150 Emails on workdays. Spam not included. Approximately 35% of this requires a reply and probably 50% my attention. Of the rest it is not of high importance, but needed occasionally for reference so still not worth unsubscribing.
The other day I finally got it. I didn’t have to let email run my day. How did I solve this problem? I’ll tell you my way in the next post.
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