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Huge amounts of uninterrupted time of course gives us the ability to deep-dive into certain subjects, but there's obviously the necessity of asynchronous commun

Huge amounts of uninterrupted time of course gives us the ability to deep-dive into certain subjects, but there's obviously the necessity of asynchronous communication that doesn't move at postal speeds. Having said that though, frequent context switches really make a huge difference on how productive I am in a day. I remember reading somewhere that checking your email at a rate of even once or twice an hour is enough to effectively kill your productivity for cognitively heavy tasks. The fact that he has his secretary print out emails for him to write responses onto is a little hardcore, but I imagine that it tremendously helps with keeping his life distraction-free.

colechristensen 8y ago
Startup Idea: An email service that only delivers messages once or twice a day.
- Benjammer 8y ago
  Anything that aligns incentives between the startup's business and user communication effectiveness would be welcome, honestly. So many services are just designed for "engagement," which often leads to synchronous alerts and chat-like communication.
- modeless 8y ago
  Google Inbox had this feature. RIP
- TwelveNights 8y ago
  While it seems interesting at first glance, it would be weird to be paying for a product that does "less" than alternatives. The added value of strictly enforcing this policy is also something that people can learn to do innately. Also, distraction-prevention startups never seem to work well ultimately, since people want to distract themselves.
- User23 8y ago
  Startup idea: a mail service that only delivers once a day, has a nominal cost to senders, and has a secretary service to throw out the advertisements and other junk. Note: a spam filter does not fulfill the secretarial service requirement.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  Just use any email application and don't have it online all day, except when you manually sync. I bet you could use Mail.app and create an automator task to run on a schedule. Or just use a cron job.
  - colechristensen 8y ago
    The idea is more about instilling a culture of treating email or something like it in a specific way by introducing restrictions which are unavoidable and not about changing how one person reads email.
    - gnicholas 8y ago
      That's why I included the second part of my comment. It automates it so you don't have to think about it.
- taneq 8y ago
  In Thunderbird, go to 'Options > Account Settings', select 'Server Settings' for the server you want to limit from the list on the left, and change the 'Check for new messages every' field to 720 (or however many minutes you want between emails). I'm certain there are equivalent settings in most email clients. Edit: Updated seconds to minutes, I misread the form. Although I'm happy to report that you can set it to check every 43200 minutes if you so desire. :)
  - colechristensen 8y ago
    It is also possible to just not check your email more than once a day, but that's not really the point (which was mostly a joke) Email tends to be fairly useless in organizations because people don't read them and are overwhelmed by messages nobody needs to read. Slack and the like capitalize on being different from email by being instant and easy, what if someone else could capitalize on being slow and encouraging not-interrupting-people and putting thought into long form communication. (how many meetings have we all been to that should have been three sentences in an email?)
    - speedplane 8y ago
      > Email tends to be fairly useless in organizations because people don't read them What organization do you work in? Everywhere I've worked, I've been responsible for every piece of information sent to me. Slack doesn't help at all. Conversations are based on person-to-person communications rather than ideas like an email thread with a subject line.
      - colechristensen 8y ago
        I have been in many different environments almost exclusively technical organizations selling tech in some form or another from tiny startups to enormous organizations, and the only time I remember anybody really caring about email was my first job at a university. I think that was mostly because IM barely existed (literally my first task was setting up an XMPP server).

colechristensen 8y ago

Startup Idea: An email service that only delivers messages once or twice a day.

Benjammer 8y ago
Anything that aligns incentives between the startup's business and user communication effectiveness would be welcome, honestly. So many services are just designed for "engagement," which often leads to synchronous alerts and chat-like communication.
modeless 8y ago
Google Inbox had this feature. RIP
TwelveNights 8y ago
While it seems interesting at first glance, it would be weird to be paying for a product that does "less" than alternatives. The added value of strictly enforcing this policy is also something that people can learn to do innately. Also, distraction-prevention startups never seem to work well ultimately, since people want to distract themselves.
User23 8y ago
Startup idea: a mail service that only delivers once a day, has a nominal cost to senders, and has a secretary service to throw out the advertisements and other junk. Note: a spam filter does not fulfill the secretarial service requirement.
gnicholas 8y ago
Just use any email application and don't have it online all day, except when you manually sync. I bet you could use Mail.app and create an automator task to run on a schedule. Or just use a cron job.
- colechristensen 8y ago
  The idea is more about instilling a culture of treating email or something like it in a specific way by introducing restrictions which are unavoidable and not about changing how one person reads email.
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    That's why I included the second part of my comment. It automates it so you don't have to think about it.
taneq 8y ago
In Thunderbird, go to 'Options > Account Settings', select 'Server Settings' for the server you want to limit from the list on the left, and change the 'Check for new messages every' field to 720 (or however many minutes you want between emails). I'm certain there are equivalent settings in most email clients. Edit: Updated seconds to minutes, I misread the form. Although I'm happy to report that you can set it to check every 43200 minutes if you so desire. :)
- colechristensen 8y ago
  It is also possible to just not check your email more than once a day, but that's not really the point (which was mostly a joke) Email tends to be fairly useless in organizations because people don't read them and are overwhelmed by messages nobody needs to read. Slack and the like capitalize on being different from email by being instant and easy, what if someone else could capitalize on being slow and encouraging not-interrupting-people and putting thought into long form communication. (how many meetings have we all been to that should have been three sentences in an email?)
  - speedplane 8y ago
    > Email tends to be fairly useless in organizations because people don't read them What organization do you work in? Everywhere I've worked, I've been responsible for every piece of information sent to me. Slack doesn't help at all. Conversations are based on person-to-person communications rather than ideas like an email thread with a subject line.
    - colechristensen 8y ago
      I have been in many different environments almost exclusively technical organizations selling tech in some form or another from tiny startups to enormous organizations, and the only time I remember anybody really caring about email was my first job at a university. I think that was mostly because IM barely existed (literally my first task was setting up an XMPP server).