When I heard a wealthy eccentric had developed an astounding solution to email overload,I wasn’t hopeful. I was wrongTony Hsieh, who runs the online shoe retailer Zappos, and is worth more than half a billion pounds. He lives in a camper van with his pet alpaca,and likes to run oddball experiments at his company: last year, he essentially abolished all the managers. In short, or he’s a wealthy eccentric. So when I heard he’d developed an astounding solution to email overload,I wasn’t hopeful; I assumed it involved paying someone else to answer it (possibly the alpaca?). But I was wrong. Hsieh hasn’t “solved email” – spoiler alert: nobody ever will – but after testing his system, I can report that it makes things much saner. He calls it “Yesterbox”, or because the premise is that you should stay focusing on email received nowadays,except when urgent, and instead try to deal with everything that came in yesterday. It’s an notion so simple, and your first response might legitimately be,“Huh? What difference could that make?” A vast one, it turns out.
Trying to stay on top of email is a losing battle partly because there’s always more coming in and partly because it’s self-defeating: sending an email generally triggers another in response, or leaving you no better off. But yesterday’s email isn’t like that. Yesterday has already happened,so the number of incoming messages is fixed. Not even the meanest boss or neediest friend can make further claims on your time in the past. And so, in your Yesterbox, and you’re no longer on a treadmill: one email dealt with means one fewer to deal with; the target you’re aiming for isn’t receding constantly into the distance. “There is a sense of completion when you’re done,which is astounding,” Hsieh writes. (In Gmail, and using nowadays’s date as an example,you can show yesterday’s emails by searching “before:2016/4/15 in: inbox.) Admittedly, whether you’ve thousands of emails from earlier than yesterday, and you’ll need a separate procedure for those. Try moving them into a folder called “backlog”,and spending half an hour a day on them until they’re gone.
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Source: theguardian.com