Killing Email: How and Why I Ditched My Inbox | Hacker News Reader

Killing Email: How and Why I Ditched My Inbox

zenhabits.net

22 pointsyesbabyyes23 comments

TLDR:

1. I’ve set up an autoresponder for my email that explains what I’m doing and how to contact me and for what reasons.

2. Twitter will be my main form of communication.

3. For longer conversations, there’s IM or Skype chats. These will be required to be scheduled, and are for friends, interviews or close colleagues only — you’ll have to DM me on Twitter, and we’ll set up a 10-minute chat.

4. For collaboration, I’ll use Google Docs and/or wikis.

5. Friends and family can call me. Especially if they don’t use Twitter. They already do, actually, so email isn’t absolutely necessary. The phone is better for personal communication anyway.

6. A few types of emails will get through for now. My filters allow emails for advertisers, interviews, refunds, and people who want to hire me, to get through to my inbox.

Sounds like more work than it's worth. Why not just learn how to use email judiciously, turn off all Pavlovian-response-inducing new mail notifications on your computers and phone, check 2 or 3 times a day, and continue to benefit from email's almost uniquely asynchronous nature.

I'm really glad I could convince a good part of my family to contact me via email. I'd rather ditch the telephone in favor of email than the other way around.

I'm going to be highly biased and say that there are several things massively wrong with that approach:

Twitter means you need a twitter account to communicate. IM means you need an IM account with the same provider as them to communicate. Same with Skype. Same with Google Docs (though this at least has an "anyone with the link" option). Same with most wikis.

All they've done is say "Want to contact me? Go through closed platform X rather than using this thing you're essentially guaranteed to have called 'email'". It's a massive middle-finger to anyone who doesn't have those accounts; they're requiring they sign up, give away information, and will probably abandon the accounts shortly after, just because they have an issue with the word "email".

If they really wanted emails to behave like Twitter, set up an autoresponder based on email length. > 200 characters = autoreply, explaining about length problems due to volume, and resort to Docs if they need more length (as that has a public option). It's the best of all worlds, and you don't need to worry about Twitter losing your old messages (email providers are typically far more reliable).

  I’ve found that I don’t need to check Twitter as often, or spend as long
  processing it. It’s not an always-connected, always-communicating tool
  that some people think it is — you can choose when and what to process,
  and only do it 1-2 times a day if you like, scanning your messages and
  not necessarily replying unless you feel the need to do so. It will be
  another inbox, but not as tyrannical as email.

This sounds remarkably like email to me. I don't understand the difference. I was expecting an article about ditching email-type communication entirely, which I wouldn't dream of doing but would be an interesting experiment.

As for ditching email-like communications entirely, it worked well for Donald Knuth: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html

Perhaps one day I will try it out!

Even he still requires email from time to time he admits, he just proxies them through his secretary. I wish I had one of those myself to filter my communications with the world. Then I wouldn't have email or anything. Just a wonderful assistant who managed it all and let me be free to focus on other things. I need me a Pepper Potts to my Tony Stark dammit!

Agreed. It sounds like he's throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and then badly re-inventing it with a hodgepodge of other services.

Came here to post the same. The problem has more to do with how he uses online communication than with any particular tool.

He took an efficient, even if inelegant, system and replaced it with 5 different services all with their own storage system, credentials and purpose.

That seems like a really terrible idea and a surefire way to increase time waste. Could you imagine trying to find something quickly with a system like this?

Long term this sounds like a terrible idea.

What happens when you want to search for a message or attachment you got 3 months ago? Good luck via Twitter.

What happens when Twitter imposes some TOS that you don't like or stifles innovation by closing their platform?

What about the fact that any 3rd party app you give read permissions to can read your direct messages?

The list goes on and on.

I use Twitter but in the big picture it's not remotely close to being able to replace email in the long run.

That's not even to mention Twitter's historically frequent downtime.

I think the biggest problem is simply that Leo's making other people do more work.

When you adopt a workflow that's out of the norm, you are forcing the people who want to work with you to make a decision: 1) Make an exception in THEIR workflow to deal with your quirks, or 2) Don't work with you.

It sounds like a deliberate decision to try to filter out some of the noise, but, yeah, it does seem kind of anti-social or selfish.

I considered doing something similar a while back, but just like snail mail, you cant avoid it if everyone else still insists on using it. I'm still dumbfounded that i have to verify my identity via fax for some organisation or by letter for government institutions. There's just no avoiding it.

its the same with email. How will he deal with verifying his identity with a website that emails him the verification link?

But more to the point, if it's spam he wants to avoid, or people trying to get his attention, he's not going to avoid that just by going to Twitter or Skype or anywhere else.

It's about managing expectations. Go about emails with the mind set of training people around you to work with your expectations.

Important emails get answered quickly, while every non-issue is trashed. Over time this has worked out great for me. I don't get overwhelmed with emails, slowly it has gone down as those around me understand my priority.

This post is almost 2 years old.

It's hard to tell without a post date. Or comments.

Yeah, I know. Really just more of an FYI thing than a complaint. As far as I know, Leo still maintains the same policy.

Oh and while I hate the idea of going email-less, I had a chance to share drinks with Leo and found him to be a great guy and a gentleman. Not sure it has anything to do with the topic, but as a non-fan of minimalism, I thought it would be relevant.

Yikes, he doesn't display the published date anywhere (aside from hints in the blog post itself). There's a reason we timestamp things, Leo!

There are so many things wrong with this even before you remember that you need an email address to establish a Twitter account.

Man becomes hermit, film at 11.

Babuta and other "neo-minimalists" are more dedicated to hyping up their personality cults than actually minimizing. The TLDR by SkyMarshal demonstrates this well.

The system to rid himself of email is more complex than optimizing his email setup.

Not to mention that the fact he probably gets more email than others is because his very public personality makes him more desirable for other people to contact him in the first place.

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