

Pause Your Inbox: Productivity++ - ezl
http://www.inboxpause.com

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skore
I used to be pretty into these kinds of things (typical case of "lifehacking
to a point where it becomes a new job"), but eventually, only two things
helped:

1) Discipline

2) Relentless Filtering

Any reasonably advanced mail app worth its salt has implemented #2. Every time
an email comes in that you open and find that it's wasting your time and isn't
actionable or necessary in any way, create a filter that would have moved it
into a "Noise" folder. (AND "mark as read", so it's not another task to mark
them yourself!)

After doing this for a number of years, this now filters about 10 to 20 emails
every day, so I guess it's saving me about half an hour of my time (and
considerable frustration and/or self loathing).

(The filter rules in Thunderbird are somewhere around 200 email addresses,
snippets of texts in the header or body of an email. I actually had to make a
second filter since the filter edit UI in thunderbird started to be sluggish
after a hundred or so.)

Should you ever wonder whether you're missing out on something, just check the
Noise folder. Most of the time, the answer is a resounding: Nooooope.

Of course, the only thing that really helps is _discipline_. The one thing
that no app in the world can actually replace.

The sooner you start working on your discipline instead of putting that off by
band-aiding yet another slightly unwelcome minor character trait with an app,
the better.

~~~
josho
If a simple filter (or 100 filters) are sufficient then shouldn't you ask
yourself why are you receiving these emails?

Why not unsubscribe from the mailing list; or have your team document their
status in a project tracker instead of CCing half the company on emails?

Not that I don't appreciate your approach. I have my mail client provide no
mail notifications unless the email is from my Important list of contacts. So
my inbox builds up until _I am ready_ to spend time on it.

~~~
skore
Sometimes you don't have control over a subscription (semi-spam), other times
it makes sense to at least have them archived "just in case".

The bottom line is: I have decided that whenever I run into a "this is wasting
my time" situation, there is a single action (that takes seconds to complete)
to solve it.

Also - Trying to compete with professional people trying to get my attention
is a losing game - I just filter and they never find out they won part of the
arms race.

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TomMasz
Or, you could close your Gmail browser window and turn off any mail checkers
you might have running.

~~~
karlb
Your advice sounds reasonable, but closing my Gmail browser window is not an
option for me. Most of my tasks require sending emails or searching for old
ones, so I use Gmail frequently. And every time I see an email in my inbox, I
find it hard to resist opening and replying to it.

I've been using Inbox Pause since I discovered it at the start of last month
(I use Baydin's Boomerang tool too). I now go through emails twice a day. This
has several advantages: (i) I go through my inbox with more urgency, because
my mindset seems to be different when I have many emails to process—especially
because I start the final session about 30 minutes before leaving work. (ii)
Long discussion threads appear all in one go, rather than being "drip-fed" to
me. (iii) It's impossible to receive more than two replies from me in one day
– which I'm happy with, because anything that requires more than two replies
may be more efficiently handled with a phone call. Either way, it helps me to
spend more time doing my more-important tasks.

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pyxy
Oh what a surprise! It looks like just a backward time travel to the world
where we used mail client applications with POP3 mail servers. You have time
to read emails, you open your mail client, push "Get new messages" and voila!
you read your mail!

Actually it's often when you find that old good simple approaches are just
more comfortable for many people than the new shiny technologies that
disturb/annoy you all the time.

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shanellem
This actually seems like a really great concept. Simple, yes. But definitely
something I'd use. Thanks!

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btbuildem
Or, you know, you could close the Gmail tab and turn off push notifications..

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robmclarty
I'm sorry, am I missing something? Is it really that hard to just turn off
your mail app during periods of in-depth work, and then turn it back on when
you want to spend some time with your inbox?

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Void_

      the paradigm-shiftingest, game-changingest email innovation of 2012
    

Not sure about that. Just silencing my iPhone and quitting Mail.app works for
me.

~~~
jgv
I think they might be making fun of Mailbox for iOS.

~~~
jaaronlong
[http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/08/31/for-dont-want-
emails-i...](http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/08/31/for-dont-want-emails-inbox-
the-magic-pause-button/)

------
eclipticplane
I use this, plus Boomerang [1] and its fantastic (delay send emails).

[1]: <http://www.boomeranggmail.com>

