"Your inbox is a to-do list that others have made for you, and is inherently chaotic."
- Redesigning Google: how Larry Page engineered a beautiful revolution (via thisistheverge)
(via thisistheverge)
You Probably Write a Novel's Worth of Email Every Year
So we know that the average worker spends 13 hours a week — 28 percent of office time — on email. Which multiplies out to (eek) 650 hours a year.
But what does that time investment look like as physical — well, “physical” — output? How does it amass as words typed and sent and otherwise generated? Here’s one estimate: 41,638 words.
To put those 41,638 discrete pieces of communication in perspective, that word count, in the aggregate, is roughly equivalent to a novel that is 166 pages in length…. slightly greater than The Old Man and the Sea (127 pages long), slightly less than The Great Gatsby (182 pages), and just about equal to The Turn of the Screw (165 pages).
"According to the most recent available data from comScore, Microsoft’s Hotmail was the most popular Internet-based email service globally as of May, with about 325 million unique visitors. Yahoo’s service ranked second, with roughly 298 million users, while Google’s Gmail garnered about 289 million users."
- Whoa: It’s 2012, and the World’s Most Popular Email Service Is … Hotmail
You Should Forget About Push Notifications for Your Email
For most of us, instant email back-and-forth is not nearly as important as we make it out to be. Yes, email is where a lot of our most important communication happens. But most email isn’t something that requires you to drop everything the moment something new pops into your inbox. That you think so is an indication that email is probably screwing up a lot of your day.
THIS.
"Slowness, in this age of constant connectivity, is its own kind of value. Most of our current communications technologies — the phone call, the text message, the tweet — drive against the qualities that hundreds of years of letter-writing have represented: the thoughtful, the deliberate, the unrequited. The text-and-tweet are insistent, and their insistence is implicit; they expect their replies right away. And they are fair in that expectation, because as technologies they are, at their core, about talking rather than text: They’re conversational, promoting not only the intimacy, but also the immediacy, of speech."
What Went Wrong With Gmail? - The Atlantic
“Here’s the problem. See that big text box in which I type hundreds of emails per week? Well, it is obscured by chat windows that I use thousands of times per week. The two basic ways that I communicate are in direct conflict with each other… Which leads me to the key question: what happened, Google?”
Tech Firm Implements Employee ‘Zero Email’ Policy
“CEO Thierry Breton of the French information technology company said only 10 percent of the 200 messages employees receive per day are useful and 18 percent is spam. That’s why he hopes the company can eradicate internal emails in 18 months, forcing the company’s 74,000 employees to communicate with each other via instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface.”
"The AOL address is nothing more than a digital AARP card."
"
Our brains are just hard-wired to respond to emails because society has taught us it’s rude not to. We think of them as letters — even the icons for apps like Gmail and Mac Mail make us think of them this way. It’s rude not to respond to a letter.
Screw that.
- MG Siegler | Inbox 10,000: Some Thoughts After A Month Away From Email | TechCrunch
