Andreas Klinger, a startup founder and angel investor, writes on management, remote teams, Lean Startup, hypergrowth startups, and email habits.
Commenters recommend his remote-team crash course and management advice, and note his EU Inc advocacy; one agrees with the Lean Startup critique.
People like to diss email as a "todo list that other people can add items to", but really, this holds for just about all communication channels.
So for me, what worked is to only use one channel (in my case, my work gmail) as a valid TODO-inbox. Everything else doesn't count.
This means that if someone WhatsApps me something that requires a TODO, I ask them to email me a reminder. In my particular social situation, this tends to work. If they don't want to do this, it's probably not important enough
I keep my email itself clean by using Andreas Klinger's classic gmail-TODO-setup (https://klinger.io/posts/dont-drown-in-email-how-to-use-gmail-more-efficiently). That article is 9 years old now but it still works perfectly, despite Google's reputation for killing niche apps/features.
Then, I enable email notifications in key apps (eg Slack and GitHub), most of which I archive right away, but occasionally mark as a TODO using the gmail-TODO-setup. This means I never have a secondary "unread message as TODO items" list in slack, or similar in GitHub. It's very nice.
Finally, I use "Simple Gmail Notes" (https://bart.solutions/simple-gmail-notes/) to add little notes to myself about what a TODO-email is about. eg "review this" or "delegate to someone", etc.
inbox-0 or not, it is still very helpful to use the multiple inbox feature in gmail [0], I've separated mine into "inbox", "follow up", "upcoming events", "to read". this way the screen is utilized better and i can actually see agenda.. also archive them after moving so that inbox only has items that still need attention.. Most people probably don't realize the cognitive effort they waste on re-parsing the same messages in inbox over and over and over again.
I also tried to engineer a sort of self-destruction messages. The kind that are relevant for a day or few but don't need to be kept. I added the rules to mark those as "disposable" and once in a while i just nuke them from my inbox. This is still a manual step so it would be nice if something like a self destructive message label was invented in case el Goog is watching this
[0] http://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-to-use-gmail-more
(Not parent author) I believe what makes HEY compelling to some email users is that it is opinionated about what email workflow should be like and fits the bill for many.
While a similar way of using email can be achieved in other mail clients [0] the simplicity of having such features by default it's by itself a good reason.
Some features that are non-trivial to emulate in other email clients are:
- Grouping emails with different subjects etc to the same
- Adding private notes is some emails
- Clipping specific parts
- Some UI specific features (Focus & Reply etc.)
[0] https://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-to-use-gmail-more
Yes, it should take too long, but also there is sometimes too fanaticism about the Lean Startup theory. Too often people get stuck in the loop of testing and testing without really following a clear entrepreneurial idea. The risk is to end up building a nicely market-fitting product, but not a disruptive/visionary product.
Andreas Klinger described this amazingly well in his blog post "Why Lean Startup Sucks For Startups"... he wrote right after the Leas Startup Conference of 2013 :)
http://klinger.io/post/69794653694/why-lean-startup-sucks-for-startups
The guide below got me from 2,000 unreads to inbox zero in less than 30 minutes. The key is to archive pretty much everything older than a month or two since it likely wasn’t getting done anyways. You can still search archives if you do remember something later.
Like the other poster said - take it easy. I have thousands of bookmarks too, and I know one of these days I’ll write a script to get it all exported, but until then, I’m going to continue appending.
https://klinger.io/posts/dont-drown-in-email-how-to-use-gmail-more-efficiently
Has anyone managed to replicate the linked Gmail guide[1] on Thunderbird? I currently am able to reply+archive[2] some emails, but the todo emails hang around in my inbox till I complete the task and then archive them.
Ideally, I would like to not see the ToDo emails till I am ready to look at them.
[1] https://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-to-use-gmail-more
[2] Ctrl+R, compose reply, Ctrl+Enter to send, A to archive message.