How can you reduce your emails by 50% a day? | Hacker News Reader

How can you reduce your emails by 50% a day?

blog.taskforceapp.com

17 pointsniccolop13 comments

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

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?

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.

Haven't you just described Gmail?

Maybe I did. Good point.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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