FRESH

Hacker News

Home

Your inbox is a bandit problem

101 points by zdw

by sambishop

11 subcomments

I've always been fascinated by people who seem to have this problem. I've heard multiple individuals describe responding to emails as an infinite attention suck sort of like doomscrolling. For me, email is 99% updates/promotions, 0.99% real humans that I can hit with a one liner, and 0.01% humans that really require a thoughtful response. Something must happen to these email people where they grow prominent enough and advertise their address enough that they get inundated with genuine email that is all from thoughtful humans? Feels like a problem I would enjoy having, at least for a while.

by xandrius

1 subcomments

I follow the mantra "Inbox <20". Inbox 0 is not flexible enough and freestyle Inbox is not manageable in the long term.
Together with filters, freely reporting as spam/unsubscribing, my Inbox <20 becomes a sort of todo list which I can review and handle whenever needed (this include flight/hotel bookings, getting back to complex emails, etc.).

by Mathnerd314

1 subcomments

For me, the entire inbox is this DBTC folder. I have notifications set up on my smartwatch and I triage each email in real-time as it comes in. If it's urgent, I act on it. If it is important or I want to follow up, then I add it to my (separate) to-do list, with a Google tasks voice command. And otherwise I just ignore the notification and the email sits there in the inbox until I feel like dealing with it. I use the unread status and pick things off in occasional focus sessions. Some things never get "read", and that's because they don't matter. Zero bandit stuff because I know exactly what's in my inbox at any given time, at least up to what my analog brain can hold. It fits right into the old "I heard a noise. What is it?" routine humans used when we were hunter-gatherers.

by dredmorbius

0 subcomment

I've realised a few things dealing with time and attention, and devised a few strategies with varying degrees of success:
- Information consumes attention (as has been long observed).
- Corollary: excess information demands fast, cheap, regret-free rejection mechanisms. TFA describes several such approaches. The "DBTC" folder is one, but specifically refusing to use other, unmanageable, message queues (Twitter, FB, Slack, etc.) would be others. If a tool refuses to respect your boundaries, reject that tool.
- Time-blocking for low-urgency, but still significant tasks is useful. You're shifting from interrupt-driven mode to scheduled flow. This also means you can assess how your schedule relates to the incoming message flow, and whether or not that flow still exceeds your (now far more readily quantifiable) time devoted to it.
- There's still the question of how to prioritise items you're responding to. I'd suggest a rough triage method of:
1. Identifying high-priority senders (immediate family, work (management, colleagues, business relations), friends/social, and pretty much all else.
2. Randomly selecting from lower-priority queues is a way of fairly distributing your attention. If you can't do everything, sample a handful of items.
3. Quick "no"s (and learning how to phrase these delicately, if necessary) are useful. In some cases you might point the correspondent in a more useful direction. There's the physics professor's tactic of dealing with crackpot questions by directing them to one another, which preserves both attention and sanity....
My first exposure to the correspondence-limits problem came in one of the SF author Arthur C. Clarke's essay collections published in the 1970s or 1980s, in which he wrote of having had to resort to the tactic of responding to most of his own voluminous postal mail correspondence (and that international postal mail, for the most part, as he lived in Sri Lanka whilst most of his correspondents were elsewhere) with a pre-printed post-card with a set of checkboxes which answered most common inquiries. He'd already considered two further options: "Mr. Clarke regrets", and silence.
The future was not evenly distributed.

by wrs

1 subcomments

The author said they didn’t like Getting Things Done, then they almost literally reinvented Getting Things Done! Funny how sometimes an idea doesn’t click until you re-express it in your own words.

by parpfish

3 subcomments

> Many people have suggested strategies for dealing with this. One popular technique is Inbox Zero. The jokes about it suggests virtually nobody attains it, but I’m not even convinced it’s a virtue
I have inbox zero for personal and work emails. I can’t imagine living any other way.

by ryandrake

1 subcomments

My inbox at work is an ever-growing TODO list, only it's one that is written by other people. And my "Sent" folder is a list of people I need to "chase" to make sure they did what I asked them to do. I feel like this can take up as much of your work day as you let it: Getting to 10% of the things other people want me to do and nagging people who are, themselves, doing 10% of the things others are asking them to do.

by stopandth1nk

0 subcomment

I have used something similar but for a slightly different problem. A long time ago (at the start of my career) I started using a folder called “Curious George” where I put all those really interesting emails with new ideas, trends, etc. The problem is not so much death by a thousand cuts but falling down a rabbit hole of some cool idea and losing an hour of focus. I collect all those dangerous emails and then go through them periodically. The difference is that none of these really require a direct response but some of them will result in me starting one of those annoying email chains that will steal others time - so it is much better to allocate time to read thoughtfully so I am only sending along the useful bits.
For those daily thieves of attention (described here) my approach is to use my inbox itself rather than a new folder. I leave them unread and archive the other garbage. Then I go through the unreads at a scheduled time. How well does this work for me? - not great. It works well enough but maybe I should try this idea instead. The biggest challenge with any of these methods is to develop the discipline to actually schedule and keep the time to review these things.

by tracker1

0 subcomment

I tend to try to approach inbox zero... that said, I will mark stuff left to be done as unread, and tend to get through most things within a few days... at least once a week I will hit 0 messages in my mailbox. I will sometimes move stuff to different docs/archives folders in email for later retrieval, but this is separate from a need to respond to now.

by tempestn

0 subcomment

Sounds like you've invented your own spin on GTD, while thinking of it as something else. If that works for you, more power to you!

by BLKNSLVR

4 subcomments

Email is an ignorable communication medium. It has lost relevance due to its ubiquity, which led to its overuse, which led to its redundancy.
There are a lot of stragglers that haven't realized it's redundancy yet, and madly spend a significant percentage of their time and effort organizing this pulsating mass of ever-changing chaos.
If you keep replying, they'll keep asking.
Cut it down to a quick squizz once a day and get in with the actual productive work.
(My experience written as universal. I'm aware there are some important emails - but I challenge that there aren't as many as you think there are)
Edited to add: you can only work on one thing at a time. It should always be the highest priority item. If something comes in via email, there's little to no likelihood that it should be jumping to the top of the pile (email is not a real-time communication platform, and people who think it is should be corrected). An email is like the first pangs of hunger: at least 24 hours from becoming important.

by elieskilled

0 subcomment

Love it. One of the major challenges with email is that a lot of disparate content is mixed together.
I run a product called Inbox Zero (if you google the term we're the ones that come up first). I often suggest to users that they aim for "Reply Zero". They might get 100 emails per day, but only 5 need a reply. As long as those are handled they're probably good.
One of the challenges people face is that there's so much noise mixed together. Newsletter, conversations, receipts,... what you call "DBTC", and it's time consuming to sort it into buckets. And frankly, before AI it might not have been worth the effort. But with AI assistance, it's actually very doable. Inbox Zero offers it, as do a bunch of others. What you call DBTC could potentially be sorted for you into that folder automatically.
PS. not trying to shill our own product. It's open source so you can even self-host it without paying us anything.