Better email
- type: design doc
- status: I have barely thought about this
- Let's see, initial thoughts.
- I'm guessing that whatever solution I might design for me might not be optimal for most people, as I can usually relatively costlessly ignore my main email inbox for weeks/months with no major consequences.
- Also something to know about me: I tend to zero inbox about 3-4×/year, because after zero-inboxing I get addicted to staying at zero, which causes me to spend too much time in my inbox.
- too
- Too what for what? my email inbox is mostly not where the next steps to achieving my goals live, so it's kind of full of busywork type stuff. This is more true for most people than they deeply acknowledge and act on, though for most people probably less than me
- Okay so there are a couple of things I like about hey.com, though also things that are borked.
- Hey features/terms
- Imbox
- The Feed
- Paper Trail
- Set Aside
- Reply Later
- What I like
- One thing it does that resonates with Intend's vibe is that once you've looked at an email... you can kind of mark it as unread again but there's no way to just "leave it in the inbox". The equivalent action is "set aside" where "aside" means "I need to look at this later"—so it makes that action something you have to do rather than the default if you don't archive it.
- I like
- I broadly like what it's doing with distinguishing imbox, paper trail, & feed, but the categories and filter-system are inadequate (for me).
- what I want is:
- yes, although since it just filters by from-address how do I know that a "this payment failed, you have 2 weeks to fix it or your site goes down" email won't also go to the same place? scary stuff
- the existence of hey though does encourage app-makers to ensure that these types of emails come from different addresses
- probably basically fine as-is
- I'm vaguely wanting to disambiguate
- stuff that tells me about new content to read elsewhere
- emails that contain the full content
- ....something else, that's like, onboarding emails to a new app?
- Direct Correspondence
- so much of email these days is not an actual conversation, and it makes sense to treat stuff differently that is
- currently for me there is so much noise in my email inbox that I basically carry on all correspondence via facebook messenger, slacks, & other chat channels
- still, there is something nice about email for long-form correspondence, which has been lost as email has filled with newsletters etc
- it needs a totally different UI than a UI where the purpose is to get rid of everything as fast as possible
- (ahh Reply Later kind of maps onto this... not bad)
- Groups/Listservs
- this is part of where hey broke down for me
- it wants to screen by sender, which created a lot of noise in my screener
- whereas I really want to say "yes, allow all messages on this listserv"
- it wants to sort by sender
- whereas CLEARLY if someone emails me directly that should go in a different place in terms of priority than if they email a hundred- or thousand-person listserv
- I currently manage this in gmail by making a custom label+filter for most listservs I'm on, so that I can easily see just based on that, whether an email from Bob is to me or to a listserv
- FYI
- canonical examples are calendar invites. 95% of the time we've discussed the scheduling already so the email is ignorable, but in the rare situation when someone sends me an invite...
- ...I mean I usually see it on my calendar
- but then there are the rare cases where not
- and also event cancellations, which I might even want mobile notifications about (although the cost of showing up for a cancelled event is much lower when all events are virtual haha)
- public TODOs
- there's a (serious) joke that your email inbox is a todo list that anybody can add things to
- that accurately describes a subset of email, so let's demarcate that clearly
- examples
- Friend emails and says "hey can you take care of thing?"
- Company emails and says "hey your billing failed" or ""
- Government emails and says "hey you need to file this tax thing"
- ahhh I think that "Set Aside" fills this role
- though also sometimes there's an email that has both an action item and correspondence...
- recently had a situation like that, emailing an old friend to catch up and also saying "btw, can you take care of this logistical thing" and he missed the logistical thing in the course of replying, initially
- but I think this is rare and not a big thing to deal with
- What are my existing solutions to this?
- I have the Intend support mail living in intercom, so that has a separate inbox. I could also explore how I would redesign intercom, but that's somewhat separate, I think?
- I have a fuckton of gmail tags with automatic filters, mostly to give me lots of situational awareness looking at my inbox.
- I have a few filters that tag things as "mobnotify" because they might be time-sensitive; the rest of stuff I don't get mobile notifications for at all
- can also then tag any thing mobnotify manually if it has some important/urgent thing to it
- examples:
- event-related emails
- !timesensitive auto-tag
- any email that contains phrases like "no later than"
- certain complice error alerts
- I have a separate pseudo-inbox (just a filter+label) for emails from Liminal Space Agency (the group I work & live with), since those are often longer and I want to digest them more slowly rather than in zero-inbox mode, but also I want to be notified when they come in
- I currently have a prompt in my weekly review to check in:sent
- I'm also now adding a new filter to gmail that's just 'm' and it gets applied to anything I've replied to. This is primarily for listservs, to be able to visually distinguish listserv emails I've replied to from ones I haven't
- Separate from categories, what buttons would I like to have?
- Archive/clear all from this sender