

How can you reduce your emails by 50% a day?  - niccolop
http://blog.taskforceapp.com/

======
hugh3
I want to know how I can increase my volume of _interesting_ emails by 50% per
day.

~~~
lionhearted
I feel the same way. I like talking with people about cool things, I'd say 80%
of the cool stuff I'm introduced to originally comes from someone I'm in touch
with. Hacker News included.

So I tell you what, hugh - why don't you write me an interesting email and
I'll write back? What are your key goals you're working on? Or recommend me a
book, or ask for a book recommendation on a particular topic. I'll write back.
All details in my profile.

Hell, anyone can write me if you're a decent person. You - _yes you_ \- what
are you working on that's important to you right now?

------
arnorhs
If sometimes thought about the e-mail problem.

I'd like to make an app that let's you do the following:

1) You sign up for an account.

2) You feed the app your e-mail address, username, passowrd, hostname.
Multiple e-mail addresses if you have them.

3) The app would then regularly check up on your e-mail and combine all your
aggregated e-mails like notifications etc into a single e-mail, which you
could check out any time you like.

4) The app could filter some spam (if you have a host that doesn't have spam
filtering)

5) The app could do smart stuff with your e-mails like pulling all the
contacts that send you e-mail and creating a centralized contacts list
automatically (maybe even attempting to parse signatures)

6) It would also be nice if you could use the app as your webmail, if your
host doesn't already support webmail (they are out there)

And you could probably think of more features. It could be really helpful for
people stuck with horrible e-mail hosts.

~~~
timcederman
Haven't you just described Gmail?

~~~
arnorhs
Maybe I did. Good point.

Can you use gmail with other mail hosts? That is, without google apps?

------
mr_justin
I like the simplicity of using an alt email account that sends you daily
digests. OtherInbox is an example, though I do not endorse that service in
particular.

~~~
lukeschlather
I just have gmail tags like 'facebookspam' that skip inbox and I can peruse at
my leisure. Usually just to mass mark as read.

------
espadagroup
This actually looks pretty cool and useful, but it's in beta, way to douse my
excitement with a cold bucket of waiting

------
herdrick
By responding to fewer of them, more slowly, that's how.

------
ww520
Here's how you should deal with emails after a long vacation. Ctrl-A and
Delete.

If it's important enough, it will be re-sent.

Edit: I see lot of downvotes. But I wasn't joking. What's more important in
life? Doing busy work with your inbox? If an email sitting in your inbox for
more than a week and have no impact on your life even you haven't dealt with
it, it probably really has no impact on your life.

~~~
lionhearted
Nah, that's not necessary. I had 700 emails in my inbox three months ago, and
I got them down to 0 after about a month. I set milestones:

-Inbox to 600 -Inbox to 500 -Inbox to 400 -Inbox to 300 -Inbox to 200 -Inbox to 100 -Inbox to 70 -Inbox to 50 -Inbox to 30 -Inbox to 15 -Inbox to 10 -Inbox to 5 -Inbox empty

I figured it'd get harder to clear down as it got closer to the bottom. In the
beginning it was easy - search and archive newsletters, alerts, digests, and
spam. Archive all emails from someone after I got off the phone with them and
covered everything, but let the old request sit in the box. Archive all emails
from ex-girlfriend. Etc.

Interestingly, I had a lot of little milestones at the end, but it turns out
it wasn't as hard as I thought: There were about 10 emails that I used a
reminder for "general to do" that I added to a notepad file to-do list, and
archived them. Then there was about 5 decisions where there was no
particularly good decision and I didn't like my choices, so I just sacked up
and picked one option or the other and did it. Like, one of them was canceling
something that had an early cancel fee, and I'd been waffling on it, and I
just said screw it and picked one way or the other. I don't even remember the
details, which means I should have probably just picked the first time I
looked at it.

Anyways, email inbox can be overwhelming if it's big. Tackle it in chunks,
almost make a game out of it. It's nice to keep crossing off things on the
list... 700... 600... 500... 400... was quite a good feeling. It's nice to be
organized, too.

~~~
ww520
That sounds like a lot of work. Dealing with inbox becomes a fulltime job.

~~~
lionhearted
It wasn't so bad. It took a couple big pushes of effort, but the rewards were
great. Going through the inbox instead of just deleting or archiving
everything made me find a good 20-30 things I really should have dealt with,
and I did. Beyond that, I just handled my inbox when I was tired and wasn't
able to do anything more meaningful - it cut my Hacker News time down a little
bit for one month, and now I've got a clean inbox that never gets to two pages
long. That's really quite valuable for me.

