To this day, the trip bundles feature of Google Inbox remains one of my all time favorite tech feature. It was such a breeze to plan out long trips with multiple flights and lodgings. It bundles...
To this day, the trip bundles feature of Google Inbox remains one of my all time favorite tech feature. It was such a breeze to plan out long trips with multiple flights and lodgings. It bundles all of it automatically when I get the confirmation emails! The UI was minimalistic and it fit in an era when phones displays were still relatively small.
Unfortunately, by the looks of the Shortwave app, it seems to cater toward business use of email and not personal use, which I thought was the real magic behind Google Inbox. The personal (non work) internet was good while it lasted.
I never used Google Inbox, as by the time it came out I had pretty much de-Googled my life. But this paragraph from the article stuck out to me because I manage my own inbox like a to-do list: The...
I never used Google Inbox, as by the time it came out I had pretty much de-Googled my life. But this paragraph from the article stuck out to me because I manage my own inbox like a to-do list:
In addition, the team also built Shortwave with the idea that your inbox, whether you like it or not, is a to-do list. “You can either give users the tools to manage [their inbox] like a to-do list, or you can force them to manage it in their heads,” Lee explained. “They added a literal checkmark in Inbox to say, ‘hey, you’re marking this thing as done,’ as well as other to-do list-type features. We’ve done the same thing.”
The way I manage my email is that once I delete a message, that means the item is completed. I also delete sent items once they're stale, as well. To me, email has mostly become passive. I don't send much email. Rather, stuff comes to me in the form of tasks. Maybe it's a bill, or it's a notification that tax forms are ready to download, or whatever else. It's really not difficult to "manage it in my head." I currently have two messages to deal with right now. I can just look at my inbox, see those two items, and know what I have to do. Very rarely do I have more than a handful of messages lingering in my inbox.
I've been practicing the Inbox Zero way of managing email for years now, even when I worked my old corporate job. My goal is always to have a completely empty inbox (and for me, an empty sent items too) because then I know I'm caught up on everything I have to do. I don't feel more tools would make it easier in any appreciable way. Rarely do I communicate with multiple people via email like you might do with Slack or with text messages. Overall, email is so much easier to manage if you take the time to unsubscribe from all the crap, and actually go through and delete the stuff you don't want or need. Then you can just process it as it comes in.
Too many people, in my opinion, use email like it's a file system rather than a to-do list and notification system. So I like this idea, Shortwave, but I also wonder if maybe with the popularity of services like Slack for communication, email is slowly falling out of favor. It's not going away any time soon, of course, but I wonder how necessary new tools for email are when it feels almost like a languishing technology.
This was the major upside to Inbox, you could create tasks that fit in line with your emails and you had the ability to archive or complete an email or task, truly amazing at the time. You could...
This was the major upside to Inbox, you could create tasks that fit in line with your emails and you had the ability to archive or complete an email or task, truly amazing at the time. You could schedule, set reminders, and more just as you would in a To Do list for every email. Tasks and emails were one of the same. Sad day when they retired it, There were a few services that tried to recreate the experience, none of them well.
To this day, the trip bundles feature of Google Inbox remains one of my all time favorite tech feature. It was such a breeze to plan out long trips with multiple flights and lodgings. It bundles all of it automatically when I get the confirmation emails! The UI was minimalistic and it fit in an era when phones displays were still relatively small.
Unfortunately, by the looks of the Shortwave app, it seems to cater toward business use of email and not personal use, which I thought was the real magic behind Google Inbox. The personal (non work) internet was good while it lasted.
I never used Google Inbox, as by the time it came out I had pretty much de-Googled my life. But this paragraph from the article stuck out to me because I manage my own inbox like a to-do list:
The way I manage my email is that once I delete a message, that means the item is completed. I also delete sent items once they're stale, as well. To me, email has mostly become passive. I don't send much email. Rather, stuff comes to me in the form of tasks. Maybe it's a bill, or it's a notification that tax forms are ready to download, or whatever else. It's really not difficult to "manage it in my head." I currently have two messages to deal with right now. I can just look at my inbox, see those two items, and know what I have to do. Very rarely do I have more than a handful of messages lingering in my inbox.
I've been practicing the Inbox Zero way of managing email for years now, even when I worked my old corporate job. My goal is always to have a completely empty inbox (and for me, an empty sent items too) because then I know I'm caught up on everything I have to do. I don't feel more tools would make it easier in any appreciable way. Rarely do I communicate with multiple people via email like you might do with Slack or with text messages. Overall, email is so much easier to manage if you take the time to unsubscribe from all the crap, and actually go through and delete the stuff you don't want or need. Then you can just process it as it comes in.
Too many people, in my opinion, use email like it's a file system rather than a to-do list and notification system. So I like this idea, Shortwave, but I also wonder if maybe with the popularity of services like Slack for communication, email is slowly falling out of favor. It's not going away any time soon, of course, but I wonder how necessary new tools for email are when it feels almost like a languishing technology.
This was the major upside to Inbox, you could create tasks that fit in line with your emails and you had the ability to archive or complete an email or task, truly amazing at the time. You could schedule, set reminders, and more just as you would in a To Do list for every email. Tasks and emails were one of the same. Sad day when they retired it, There were a few services that tried to recreate the experience, none of them well.