Comment by tomkarlo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomkarlo | Hacker News Reader

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I'm an inbox-zero-er (and Googler) and I love using Inbox for that exact reason - it makes it even easier for me to deal quickly with emails I don't want to touch (e.g. promotional), and snooze emails I can't act on immediately so they'll come back next week or whenever I need to follow up on them.

That means I can have an even more focused inbox that just contains things I need to think about / respond to right now.

In comparison, I still use regular gmail for my work email and I have maybe a dozen emails sitting in there that I don't need to do anything about right now but need to follow up on soon.

IMHO, Inbox basically takes the stuff that inbox-zero folks had to learn to do manually, and makes a lot of it automated. It's particularly great on mobile.

> IMHO, Inbox basically takes the stuff that inbox-zero folks had to learn to do manually, and makes a lot of it automated. It's particularly great on mobile.

But the manual intervention is precisely what makes my zero-inbox so effective. It's also agnostic to the device/application. If I leave something unread on a device it's unread somewhere else and vice versa. If one calls it "save for later", I don't know if that also means "unread".

Why does manual intervention (per se) make your zero-inbox so effective? This isn't somehow magically processing emails for you, it's just automating how those emails are handled after you decide what to do with them.

IIRC inbox-zero says you should file all of those to a "next week" or "next month" category and then once a week go through that inbox. This effectively removes the need to do that chore, because you can just say "put this back in front of me a week/month from now."

I don't see why this is any less "device agnostic" than any other method. You can use Inbox on mobile or desktop and they stay in sync; in fact, you can use Inbox on mobile and traditional Gmail on desktop (or vice-versa) and they'll stay in sync as well. (And you do in fact konw if the email is unread or not, since that's a separate bit of status info. You can snooze an email without reading it.)

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