

What is inside your email?  - amolsarva

Been thinking during this week of lower flow email that email overload is a real thing, and it is solvable, but that the approach is not "a better mail client". The answer is a better way to do the stuff you do inside email.<p>What you do inside email varies -- calendaring, task management (as PG says), catching up with friends, discussions about work stuff, funny forwards... what else?<p>What's inside your email?<p>Some background = http://a.sarva.co/2012/12/reading-paul-graham-on-the-re-invention-of-email/<p>In other words, help me figure out what my next startup should be about (me = cofounder Virgin Mobile USA, IPO and Peek, acquired).
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georgespencer
The only moderately interesting thing I do with email (other than, er, email),
is use my drafts folder as a place to save notes so that I can access them
from the cloud.

I open a new draft email and set the subject as "Board meeting 30th December
2012". Then I jot down quick notes when I need to in bullet points.

I do the same when I'm interviewing someone (after letting them know that I'm
listening but that it's important that I take notes about some of the
technical areas we ask about). When I look inside my drafts folder I see a
nice list of events that I took notes at.

It also works great when you wake up in the night with a new idea or blog post
which you want to jot down. I can head save the draft, then pick it up on my
phone on the way in to work.

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amolsarva
Yeah totally - I do that too. Know lots of people who do

But what do you email ABOUT that's what I meant... Like emails from Amazon are
plainly not "doing email". That stuff should go somewhere else

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gregcohn
Low priority tasks and mid-term storage, low-priority long-term storage.

The right way to get to inbox zero is to ruthlessly categorize incoming email
into the right buckets for GTD or some comparable system, bumping them into
Asana, Evernote, or whatever.

I am convinced, however, that email is currently our best default inbox. It's
the most reliable place to leave something where you'll probably find it
again. I think overcoming the inertia of email-is-the-default behavior is
harder than actually building the apps that will help manage things better.

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arh68
I'm fairly young and I'm not anywhere close to email overload, but some
highlights: I have a 'server logs' label for various reports/scripts I use, an
'ideas' label I send things to myself (and reply, with each development; these
are not todos but high-level efforts). But mostly I just read NYTimes alerts.
My inbox used to be hell until I spent a few hours setting up several filters.
I don't mind checking multiple inboxes/labels, but I don't want them
overlapping.

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schoash
For the younger generation, email is no such big deal anymore, they hardly use
it. Maybe we just need different channels for communication. What if email in
the future is only used for ads and newsletter kind of stuff. The more
important communication could take place on other channels for example
iMessage. You can basically exchange messages and media, do we really need
more?

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Chris_X
I delete everything but emails that require a response.

If all the email needs is a response, I do that right away and delete the
email immediately.

If I need to do something before replying, I keep it.

This pretty much leaves only the stuff I need to do in the inbox. Also never
enable automatic deletion after a certain time, so it's possible to look up
old emails.

