What you describe is a job that requires a lot of thoughtful, or at least meaningful, answers to a lot of people. If each answer leads to a context switch, this lands hard on any other work you do. On the comms side, this may well be a full time job; or more.

But the problem has nothing to do with email. The problem is with combining what sounds like a full time management job with a full time teaching job. In fact email makes it possible to batch those requests instead of always being interrupted at an external schedule.

And sorry -- I am not trying to tell you how to live your life, what comes next is just an engineering observation. But if one is overloaded the solution is almost always to ... reduce load. Transfer some duties and/or delegate more tasks and/or hire someone to help, etc. This is usually not easy, but IME most folks under overload who say they cannot reduce it either (1) did not try to reduce it in earnest or (2) are micromanagers who are willing to delegate only partway while maintaining the role in final decisions. My 2c.

> I have a family, a house, and just lots of other things that require email correspondence.

Weird how much this can differ. I have those things and sometimes go months without looking at my email. 99.99% of messages I care about are in one of two messaging apps, or some app or another reads what matters from email for me so I don’t actually read the email myself (mostly shipping updates).

I’m a software manager at present - honestly I just ignore email. I do get some emails from customers, but they’re supposed to be communicating through proper channels so their customer success managers need to at minimum be on cc. So if anything is important people can Slack me (including to say “check your email for…”), and if there’s an action needed, I’ll click the little bookmark to add the message to the “Later” section till the issue has been addressed. I won’t in any way claim that I’m well organized, but I am proud that I don’t need to spend more than 20 minutes a week on email, because I hate email.

> Some schools are well aware of the problem and have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing an app that isn't even an app, so now we have to head into yet another app-site to pick up the kids and get updates on schooling.

Our local school seems to switch apps every year, steadily getting worse with each update until this year when they switched to something that's the least-bad of the lot.

Every time, I start thinking to myself: maybe I can just fucking write an app for them to use that wouldn't be a usability nightmare. But then I come to my senses, and realize that I absolutely don't want to maintain an app for a single customer, set up email, sms, etc., store data safely in compliance with the various regulations. So I just go back to grumbling.

For a moment I think, maybe I'm exaggerating. So I open up Telegram.

I wish HN allowed me to drop images, but basically, there's this "NEW SCHOOL TRANSITION" channel for my daughter who's switching schools.

95% of the channel is just user join spam. Yesterday someone dropped several PDFs. The title of these files is something like OZ36824106181121.pdf

Wtf is this file? I open it and it's a list of textbooks to buy. The school shop is open 29 Dec - 5 Jan, except in weekends. But some groups are to buy these books after 20 Jan. Am I in that group?

There is no CTA - do I need to buy this and when? We have a textbook borrowing scheme. Does the new school not do textbook borrowing?

This is not my only child. This is how DBTC gets me.

Yea whatsapp is just a cognitive overload nightmare. Everybody is now scheduling important stuff there, inbetween unstructured spam and whatnot, its the worst channel of them all.

You cant search properly, you cant flag or filter, the desktop apps are just slow and shitty, basically the whole thing is not optimized for productivity at all.

I can feel you. I tend to ignore WhatsApp messages at all or take up to 2-3 weeks to respond (as soon as I'm in the mood for it). People around me know that and mostly just call if they want something. Problem solved (IMHO).

Work email will be very different from job to job as well. Many orgs have basically declared bankruptcy on email and moved peofessional communication to other channels.

For the last decade my work email has been basically notifications, with sometimes a single or two emails thoughtfully written by a human. And that's probably because anything people expect me to read will be either in Slack/whatever chat app, in a ticket/task, or straight in a calendar invite with an agenda to get up to speed.

Funny thing is emails are now either only relevant for a few miliseconds where I only need to know what triggered it, or ultra important "we'll delete your account in 5 days" type that I absolutely don't want to miss. In a year I haven't got anything in between.

My work email is barely better. If it matters it reaches me in Teams (ugh, unfortunately). Email is full of spam, most of it company-internal (no I don’t give a shit about yet another “newsletter” that you probably had an LLM write anyway, because why wouldn’t you, because it’s fake work anyway)

I wonder why spam in personal email is acceptable but spam in work email is not. Why can’t we do both?

In Slack you can set reminders, add todo and such.

Pretty good, especially with sending delayed messages.

What you've done above and beyond GTD as I noted in an earlier comment (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46376558>) is that you've time-blocked when you make that assessment, on the (IMO correct and insightful) notion that triage itself is expensive. That is, determining the importance and length of a task / item of email itself consumes limited cognitive resources.

Adding to what I wrote earlier, another advantage of postal mail is that it comes at fixed intervals, typically once a day (historically possibly more often especially in cities with "morning" and "afternoon" mail, making one-day responses possible, currently with curtailments in service possibly only a few days a week). This automatically batches mail processing.

Early in the corporate adoption of email a firm I worked at only polled periodically for new external email (every 20--30 minutes or so). Whilst internal email was pretty instant, this meant that at most external emails would give cause for interruption only a few times an hour, rather than at any given moment. I've given thought to reimplementing this on my own systems from time to time, perhaps even only 2--3 times a day, say, "morning email" (limited to priority recipients), and afternoon email (the Great Unwashed Masses have their opportunity).

In reality, I've adopted Inbox Black Hole, in which I rarely if ever check personal email. Circumstances make this reasonably viable, though those are decidedly atypical and most professionals would be unable to adopt a similar tactic.

I agree “literally” was too strong, but you’ve implemented the core idea of GTD inbox, which is to have a place to put stuff you don’t want to do right now, plus the confidence that you’ll look there later (which is what lets you forget about it now).

> If this message is not urgent, and if dealing with it now will distract me, and if it’s either not long, or if it’s personal, it goes straight into the folder.

How do you know if it’s urgent, or if dealing with it will distract you, if you don’t know what the action is?

Anyway, I didn’t mean it as a criticism; that sort of thing happens to me all the time so I thought I recognized the phenomenon.

> It’s pretty easy so I’m always baffled by people who have thousands of emails in their inbox.

Because it's easiER to have thousands of emails in your inbox.

Half-jokes aside, it's not as easy for everyone. I can speak only for myself, but maybe I can explain.

My mind abhors chaos, but it abhors dealing with chaos even more. It doesn't like dealing with emails, triaging them is a pain when I could be doing something interesting instead. My mind gets repelled by my email inbox, I have to force myself, and I mean FORCE myself to do things with it.

Then there's the chance of getting sucked in by an email that is not that important but takes a lot of time, but somehow my mind latches onto it and needs it done right now. So, even just dipping in for a quick check can escalate.

Some days it's easier, but it's heavily dependent of other circumstances that keep changing.

All of this (and more) makes it very hard to establish a routine around it. And because dealing with emails repels me so much, for work I usually go through periods where I start with a clean inbox, then stuff accumulates until I get fed up enough to put on my rubber gloves and clean it again. My personal email just accumulates.

That being said, I still get things done, of course. It just looks messy, which btw is very different from the code that I write and like to surround myself with, which is sparkly clean.

I hope that shines a light on why other people's inboxes might be different from yours.

I also find myself baffled by other people's habits and behaviors sometimes. I think these differences often boil down to that different people find different things easier or harder than others. But it's quite hard to keep that in mind, let alone what it might actually feel like to be in somebody else's brain.

I will say that I do have thousands in my personal email... only in that I had it for close to a decade before I started deleting just about all new emails, if there weren't a few important emails that I hadn't archived outside email (license keys, etc) that I should, but maybe don't have outside email, I'd probably nuke it all.

For work, I'm pretty close to inbox zero... I'll mark unread if I need to followup and cannot at that moment, or if it's related to a yet-uncomplete task I'm waiting on from someone else. But at least once a week it's all empty.

I also tend to only check a couple times a day, and my personal email a couple times a week... similar no notifications. If it's important it will be IM, Text, or heaven forbid an actual voice phone call.

Not to mention that their notifications are useless. How do they know when new emails arrive?! It’s more work if you have to constantly go in and monitor instead of waiting for a push that says “here are three new messages”

Sometimes the lazy people have money that you want, or are gatekeepers on getting money from others. So you have to accommodate their laziness if you want to eat.

That only works if you don’t receive any real communication where people expect a response, right? I think that is the case for most people.

If you don’t actually communicate with email then Inbox Infinite seems the way to go. You only go in to search for a confirmation code or receipt for something. This is how I observe most people using email.

That would work, if Email search was reliable.

I thought about it so much that I started to get an mail api on one of my servers to thinking of implement it but it has some serious flaws

Firstly, the fact that either you are mentioning that there is directory of lists where your email is shown and then the cost of it (lets say a penny) which I assume would become targets of spams so not really worth it

And the other when the other person already has your email and it requires them to send a penny to you to just send it to you but that feels as if an extreme restriction and if you are already facing something like this, then at this point, you probably shouldn't read the messages or create better filters than a penny cost since a penny might not impact spammers but how are you gonna show that it costs a penny for an average person and the average fees of things would make it harder

Honestly at this point a better idea could honestly be to have a signal or matrix or anything where people can message you since it can have higher friction and if someone wants to send you a message, they can send it there as an example as compared to lets say mail.

I still didn't understand the purpose of microtransactions and I thought about it for half an hour but this does feel like it doesn't have much use case. Let me know what you think.

Micropayments are the next big thing after fusion power...

Proof-of-work was originally proposed precisely for email (specifically spam), by Dwork and Naor back in 1993!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_work