rant on email + inbox zero
Every time I hear “goal: inbox zero” it bothers me. Don’t get me wrong, I like having a clean inbox. But when I think of my inbox as a goal, I think of Drill Sergeant Amber, furiously replying and archiving, without any care going into my words. I’ve been there. I don’t like that Amber. So I’ve been trying a new approach. Now, I like to think of my inbox as a hobby. It’s a way for me to move my dreams and ambitions forward, and it’s how I communicate with the people whom I care for and those who I feel I can help. Just like any hobby, I do it in my personal time for pleasure. When I have something really exciting brewing, I’ll check my inbox more frequently. I don’t pressure myself to respond to all emails, particularly the ones that don’t resonate with me. They are distracting. I click archive, remind myself that saying no to them is saying yes to myself, and I smile. I’ve stopped apologizing if I can’t reply within hours because I have other things taking up my attention. Most importantly, I put great care and thought into the emails that matter as I never want the communication around my dreams, ambitions and the important people in my life to be a task. They are the loves of my life.
Silicon Bowery: Thoughts On Email...
I met a great company today in the email space and couldn’t help but think to myself how much the larger web-mail properties could use some of the thinking and solid things that many of these emerging players are creating. Email, for the most part, still sucks and I’m amazed that the category hasn’t really evolved. Some things that I am seeing that are awesome right now in email:
1) Social CRM - Isn’t it crazy that I still don’t know who I have been out of touch with? Where is the pane that maps to my sent mail folder and tells me who I have not connected with in 30, 60, 90 days? Better yet, where is the form email that gets deployed (i.e. ‘hey, we should catch up’) based upon how far out our last point of contact was? While still early and just scratching the surface, I really like how businesses like Etacts, Gist and Rapportive are thinking through this.
2) Scheduling - Going back and forth with emails trying to schedule meetings is a nightmare. Unless you are in the walled garden it’s really tough to map schedules and get something on a shared calender. I like tungle.me and think you should too.
3) Task Management - Do you star emails? Do you put all your emails in a folder as follow ups or, better yet, keep them all in your inbox? Craziness. Likewise, I’m a big fan of sites like Basecamp but for simple tasks that are not complex projects I don’t really want to work through a separate environment. Producteev is a good solution that I am starting to use.
4) Organization - Things like confirmation emails really annoy me. I can’t do anything with them and they only really help me on the day of the trip (what’s that confirmation number again?). Tripit and others take a novel approach to that email and really help from an organization standpoint.
Other than these folks, I’d like to see some companies think more around the funnel of the inbox and what really needs to get to me directly. Email overload is not even funny anymore, and it’s not like we are all going to unsubscribe from everything tomorrow. Why can’t newsletters have a separate pane that refreshes every day? They don’t really need to hit my inbox and I rarely read them anyways. Why can’t someone parse transaction emails or email alerts effectively to take them out of my inbox and place them somewhere else (i.e. I don’t necessarily need the email telling me that I need to pay my AMEX- why can’t that automatically show up in a chat window, a calender invite, a calender alert or maybe be added as a task automatically)?
There is still a ways to go and this is hardly an exhaustive list, but I love how these and other folks are thinking through the problems within email.
What Mike said!
A few additional thoughts:
- Scheduling: Tungle.me is good but won’t be great until they have more widespread adoption. I also don’t love the UX. I’m more frustrated than I am happy with the experience.
- Task management: I use multiple inboxes (feature you can enable in Google Labs) which helps me more effectively manage email based on context and immediate next step. I use four inboxes: requires-reply, requires-action, requires-checkup and backburner. I also label everything based on project and contextual keywords. It’s helped me tremendously in terms of prioritizing and staying on top of what I need to do now vs. later.
