Month: February 2017

I recently found one of my favorite passages ever written about email, in a select/all article from last year that I somehow missed when it first came out: “In fact, email’s simple strength is exactly why people mistake it for the real problems they face: It adapts to systems (and neuroses) so smoothly and transparently that it seems to create them, rather than enable them.” Complaining about email is like looking into a simple, well-made, perfectly smooth mirror and saying “Ewww, gross! This mirror has a bunch of pimples in it!” Sorry, man. It is not the mirror that’s blemished. We’ve discussed this… Continue reading Why You Can’t Fix Email By Fixing Email

Have you ever seen a TV show or a movie and thought, “Holy crap, this is totally my life. It’s like the writers must be stalking me and my friends!”? This has in fact never happened to me. But I did get a similar feeling when I read Zach Hanlon’s fantastic new article at Fast Company, “The Only Five Email Folders Your Inbox Will Ever Need“: “Holy crap, this is totally Timyo! It’s like Fast Company must be stalking Fabrice and Alfred!” The title pretty much says it all, as the article delineates an easy and effective way to organize email.… Continue reading The Ultimate Email Life Hack: It’s Time.

A couple weeks back, we shared an interesting article at Medium by Tristan Harris, who, among other things, is a former Design Ethicist at Google. The article, “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds—from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist” is a wide-ranging read on how tech companies use a keen understanding of behavior psychology to “hijack” our attention and get us to engage with their products and services the way they want. For example, he discusses menu choice (i.e. the options available to the user on an offered menu) as a kind of misdirection which reframes our desires to better align with the… Continue reading No One’s In Charge Here—Why It’s On Us To Fix Email Together