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 point here before, and I’m willing to admit that the mirror analogy is not totally fair. The sorry state of the email status quo isn’t 100% our fault…only like 95%.
Elsewhere in his article, author Brian Feldman puts it even more succinctly: “[W]e complain about email so much because it works so well.” It’s a handy tool that we use irresponsibly and then blame for the irresponsibility.
Blaming email won’t do anything to make email better, but more importantly, it won’t do anything to make our lives better, either.
That’s why Timyo focuses on the human side of the equation. As we put it way back in our manifesto:
“A human problem requires a human solution.”
There is no technological miracle or genius algorithm that can stop people from using email poorly. What we can do is make it very easy for people to use email in a better way, in a way that benefits every recipient of a Timyo email, and every sender as well.
By using Timyo to quickly and easily send clear expectations—
—you unclutter your recipient’s inbox and yours as well, since the odds that you’ll get a meaningful, well-timed response go way up.
And when a whole team is using Timyo, and everyone has expectations of clear expectations, the mutual benefit only increases.
Timyo‘s goal isn’t to fix email single-handedly, because good luck with that.
Our goal is to provide a simple, powerful, easy-to-use tool that helps all of us to fix email, together.
And we’d like your help with that.
