When looking at your email inbox, you typically see a paginated long list of emails dating back to forever.
The more recent emails on the top and the unread emails in bold font.
Sometimes you have a number of unread emails scattered across the list of emails and you have to dig through to figure which ones are yet to be attended to.
And if you are (un)lucky enough to be using Gmail1, locating your unread emails is further compounded by the smart organization of emails into categories. You need to further dig through the tab for each category to ascertain there are no unread emails.
Obviously you can always use filters and search, but the idea is that it takes a tangible effort to figure out the emails that require your attention.
The experience has been normalised and interacting with emails has become a boring chore that you have to periodically deal with.
But Hey, it can be fun
Sometime in 2020, the folks at 37 Signals announced Hey and it drew lots of attention. Hey brought a different perspective to the emails we are used to.
A modern user interface with a workflow that makes email fun to use.
Hey uses the term “Imbox” to emphasize that your inbox is important and the user interface is designed to deprioritise (and hide) previously read emails.
They even took it a step further by not allowing emails into your Imbox unless approved via a screener.
And notifications are opt-in. Off by default unless enabled, more on this later.
My way or the Hey way
As with many love stories, the realities set in after the initial phase of excitement and utopia.
While Hey did offer many features I really liked, I had issues with the rigidity.
You are either fully onboard with the Hey way or not, there is no in-between.
Hey also focusses so much on fanciness that it sometimes forget that it is primarily meant to be an email service. A story for another day, probably.
Inbox Zero
My preferred (and current) workflow is very much aligned with a productivity concept referred to as Inbox Zero.
The idea is that your email inbox basically becomes a todo list of actionable emails. And once you are done with an email you move it away from inbox.
The daunting task of squinting your eyes to figure out which emails need your attention has now become a 2 seconds glance at your inbox.
Or 5 seconds if we factor in the time it takes to drag your mouse to close button of the browser tab.
No shortcuts
Of course, you still need to take your time to compose and respond to the emails. And occasionally you would need to dig through the archives to locate an old thread.
But you would be doing that with a decluttered mind and no second guesses of what might have been missed. Solely focussed on the task at hand.
Boundaries
Email addresses are public. Just like your phone number, anyone can know it by taking it from someone else you have given. And that means anybody can send you an email.
While I am willing to concede that as a necessary flaw of email, I am not willing to give anyone the privilege to disrupt me. And I enforce that by having all notifications disabled.
Yes, I do not want to be notified when I have a new email. It is disruptive, rarely an important email and even more rarely an email that needs immediate attention.
I however create an exception for emails that I am actually anticipating. And that limits my choice of email providers to only those that provide this feature.
My workflow
Each email I receive fall in any of these three categories.
1. Emails I want to read
Usually from genuine people or actionable emails (e.g. 2FA code).
They arrive in my inbox and get archived after reading.
2. Emails I do not want to read, but do not want to discard
Emails that contain information I may need to reference in the future. e.g. subscription confirmations, delivery receipts, newsletters.
They land in the Feed, a custom inbox2, and automatically marked as read to neutralise the possible anticipation that comes with seeing the unread count.
I scan through the Feed once in a while.
3. Emails I never want to read
The senders get blocked and the emails deleted.
Closing Remarks
You might be wondering where I moved to after Hey or why bother paying for email when Gmail is there.
You can definitely achieve a similar workflow with Gmail, there are many articles online on achieving inbox zero with Gmail.
I however settled on Fastmail, not as fancy as Hey but flexible enough to accommodate my worklow. It is feature packed and cheaper than Hey.
As for paying for email, even if the privacy concerns are discarded, I use my personal domain for email and I would still need to pay Google anyways if I want to use it with Gmail.