Comment by lionhearted | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lionhearted | Hacker News Reader

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Am I the only person that likes email and enjoys using my inbox? I get only two things there - correspondences that are mostly interesting, and reports that I specifically want.

It can be a drag when a bunch of correspondences come in at the same time, but I try to gently discourage people from sending me useless junk, so I'm mostly free of sifting through useless junk. Gmail/Google Apps is good enough about spam, and you can use a second email address if you need one to sign up for things like frequent flyer accounts that send spammy-ish reports.

Seriously, if you don't like your inbox, try registering a new Gmail or Google Apps account and give it out selectively to people who don't send stupid stuff, and use your old email for stuff that's overwhelming. This holds up pretty well even into the 20-40 replies per day required range, which is more than most people are going to get. The key is making sure junk doesn't get mixed in with your real email - when pretty much everything is something you'd enjoy or want to see, the inbox is not this evil cursed thing.

The issue does not lie in the few emails you get every day, but the distraction which accompanies it.

There are basically two modes of email usage:

1. Pushed: Email gets pushed to your email client or mobile phone, followed by a audio visual indicator showing the amount of messages received, sometimes also a snippet of the email.

2. Pulled: You manually go to gmail.com to check whether new email arrived.

The push-mode is counter productive because it breaks your train of thought. Assuming your 20 emails arrive evenly distributed over an eight hour work day, that's one email every 24 minutes. From my experience, it takes roughly 30minutes to get the mind to focus on any moderately complex problem (especially programming). So there goes your work day.

The pull mode can be highly addictive: On some occasions, checking your email account is rewarded with a non-empty inbox (inbox zero people will think you're nuts), other times your inbox is empty and you don't get any reward. This creates a reinforcement which is variable in amount (emails received) and interval (when and whether you receive some) which psychologists call a variable interval reinforcement schedule and is found to be highly addictive. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement)

Point is, the cost of email is more than just the time required to answer the 20 emails. That is usually not the problem, unless you're a VC :-)

You can defeat the variable interval by simply checking rarely enough that there is always new mail.

If you are able to do that, you can hardly be classified as addicted though.

Almost no-one is truly addicted to email. The problem is the people that are moderately 'addicted', and they can certainly wait a few hours a couple times to kill the unpredictable reward system.

I like email, but I dislike all email applications I've tried so far.

But yes, multiple accounts. I have a sign-up-for-stuff account, a personal account, and a professional account. It has made worlds of difference - hard barriers for purposes are much more effective than filters that sometimes overlap, and usually miss brand new correspondences.

I like email. But things I like can be even bigger distractions than things I dislike. Reading even the most interesting email is not the same as being productive (although it could possibly help productivity later -- maybe).

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