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Comment by jewel | Hacker News Reader

This can be done without eliminating email altogether. Disable notifications in your email program, and have it poll only manually.

This lets you respond to email at your own pace. For me, working through my email once in the morning and once after lunch seems to be a good pace. My coworkers quickly adapted, and will use an instant message or phone call if something really needs immediate attention.

This might not be as easy for non-programmers, but for me it helps me get more done since I can focus easier, which is ultimately what will keep my boss happy. In more tricky environments, you may be able to configure filters so that important emails do send notifications.

Hopefully in the future we can all have a digital assistant that watches our email for us and detects the level of urgency automatically.

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I did this recently. I also turned off all notifications on my phone that make sound/vibrate, except phone calls and SMS (and I rarely get a call or text).

Now I don't get interrupted as often and life is much less stressful

And you never know about critical issues coming in.

I like to be notified, but if I'm reeeeally busy I don't go look at the emails. When I do, it's mostly notifications of something (delete immediately), simple requests (answer in 30 secs - 2 minutes) or stuff to get back to later (flag and/or put on my TODO list to schedule for later).

It doesn't really interrupt my work, as my actual work is still what and when I schedule it. Since most tasks have cleary communicated priorities anyway, this works nicely.

Everyone's situation is different, but I decided that no email is critical enough to interrupt me.

Wait, so you're trading asynchronous, non-interrupt driven communication (email) for synchronous, interruptive communication (IM, phone)???

I do the exact opposite - I got rid of my phone, and rarely log into IM, and have trained all my coworkers to email me so that I can respond when I'm ready, without breaking my focus.

How has email gained higher interrupt priority than phone/IM?!

I suspect the point is that the IMs and phone calls are much less numerous than the emails.

Your point about interrupt priority is a good one, though. I think simply turning off email notifications may be more than half the solution. ... There, I just did it, and I feel better already :-)

I would go so far as to suggest a company policy (or at least, a publicly announced engineering-department policy) that email may be ignored for as much as a week, and that anything that can't wait that long should use IM or phone.

I'm not thinking that most people would ignore email for that long most of the time; in practice I think most would check it once or twice a day. But sometimes people need several days uninterrupted, and they should be able to have it.

Yes, but you still then live with the idea that there could be an email you should read at any moment. I admire the self-discipline of those who can resist the urge to check, but I have never been able to.

For me, simply using Trello and Slack has obliterated all need for email with collaborators.

So do you only check Slack a couple times a day then? If not, what is the difference with email?

Excellent point. One thing that I'm noticing is that other tools are becoming just as busy as Email for me. At times I feel like there isn't a difference. The volume of email is what bothers me. But now if that volume is being transferred to Slack (sorry to point them out) I'm still stuck with the same problem. It's the people behind the tools which cause the problem IMHO :)

If something is truly important people will find a way to contact you through the phone, IM, etc. Constantly checking and responding to email is a vicious cycle that will lead people to expect you can be interrupted any time.

This is what Tim Ferris famously advocated in the four hour workweek back in 2007 [1]

[1]http://fourhourworkweek.com/2007/03/22/how-to-check-e-mail-t...

I took my inspiration to take similar measures from that same source, and I can say it makes a huge difference in my concentration and productivity.

It's still a crutch that's supremely ineffective as a structure for doing what needs to be done.

People keep telling me, "communication problems are impossible to solve, you can just never get people to communicate perfectly. You need to accept that communication problems will always exist."

I don't buy it.

When a system is ineffective at solving a structural problem, it's because the system is not fit for the problem at hand.

A giant bucket where all of our notifications, important communications, unimportant communications, and entirely irrelevant communications are dumped is simply an ineffective structure over which to build an effective process.

I wholeheartedly agree with skipping the e-mail. Use a better system, get a better process, and don't allow people to fall back on the ancient and wildly unproductive crutch.

Completely disagree. Email is the one internet technology that's had the most success and provided the most benefit in the widest variety of use cases. It pre-dates the web by decades and is still the one technology used by almost every person who uses a computer at all. The very fact that it's not focused on a specific "process" and has very little in the way of required structure or content is a strength: it works almost everywhere.

The history of software is littered with dead, defunct, and failed attempts to create task managers and communication platforms that impose a process on users. It almost never works.

Could you name a feature you think that email is lacking that you believe another system provides?

Ed: Perhaps I was being glib, but my point is that the person made a nonsense comment. I doubt anyone downvoting me can name something that email doesn't have a relatively straightforward way to implement (with perhaps the exception of IM, and only because of delay times). It's simply silly to think that /any/ system is going to let you deal with a large volume of messages a day without having to filter and configure preferences, but I've legitimately not found a replacement for email in terms of relying moderate sized chunks of information to individuals or groups.

The biggest thing for me is when I send an email to someone with a 'task' I find it's out of my head and passed over. The problem is follow-up. I sometimes remember the task that I'd set and find that its not been done as the other party has forgotten it. Its this that's the biggest thing for me

Focus.

That's the problem we're trying to solve with our startup MorphMail https://www.morphmail.com

As someone who could someday become a customer, here's some knee-jerk advice for your landing page:

- The first screen doesn't "hook" me. Put a background image or product image or something there, and a better punchline.

- I'd eliminate half the text and increase font sizes of item bodies.

- The "What is MorphMail?" section is a bit convoluted. I want to know why it's better than email. How about a side-by-side comparison with a mobile email client?

- The UI shots look very rough and a bit Windows-98-y. I get that those are probably early stage mockups, but I wouldn't consider using an app with this design. To me they are a turnoff, especially when compared to iOS Mailbox or even Gmail.

If that sounds harsh, I apologize (please consider that I wouldn't have taken the time if I didn't care); I wish you the best of luck with your product!

That's great feedback! We're a couple of engineers, so the marketing stuff isn't exactly our area of expertise. The current design is just an off the shelf jQuery mobile template to make prototyping easy while we focus on functionality.

I'm a dev too, but have some photoshop skills and have to learn this stuff myself. I can really recommend that one of you gets to know Photoshop/Pixelmator/Sketch and browses a lot of other product pages and apps (so you can "borrow" there.. stealing shamelessly is often a good idea ;)). A product needs someone who cares about that stuff.

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