Your inbox is a bandit problem

https://parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/bandit-inbox/

by zdw • 7 months ago

104 83 7 months ago

sambishop• 7 months ago

I've always been fascinated by people who seem to have this problem. I've heard multiple individuals describe responding to emails as an infinite attention suck sort of like doomscrolling. For me, email is 99% updates/promotions, 0.99% real humans that I can hit with a one liner, and 0.01% humans that really require a thoughtful response. Something must happen to these email people where they grow prominent enough and advertise their address enough that they get inundated with genuine email that is all from thoughtful humans? Feels like a problem I would enjoy having, at least for a while.

marginalia_nu• 7 months ago

It generally tends to happen if you either do enough stuff publicly, or own a business.

It's always nice when people reach out but it can also kinda tend to pile up and become a source of feelings of guilt about stuff you didn't reply to (and all of the sudden it's 16 months later and replying this late feels awkward).

1123581321• 7 months ago

It greatly depends on your job, and it doesn’t have to be a glamorous job, just one where people request things of you or you of them. For example, a friend is a corporate buyer, somewhat low in his organization, and receives about 120 emails from humans each workday. (His strategy is to select all the emails he will handle that day, put them in a folder, and call himself done when that folder is empty. I.e., he almost never sends a same day response.)

kgwxd• 7 months ago

my personal email is like yours. my work email is like the post.

stronglikedan• 7 months ago

For me, email is 99% updates/promotions, 0.99% real humans

That sounds like personal email more than the work email discussed in the article. And if that's truly the split of your work email, seems like all you need is some server side inbox filters to manage that.

hammock3• 7 months ago

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

makeitdouble• 7 months ago

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.

phantasmish2• 7 months ago

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)

bachmeier• 7 months ago

I can give you an idea of why it's so terrible. I'm a professor that teaches multiple classes, I run our department's grad programs, I do various kinds of service activities within the university, I'm the editor of a journal, I collaborate on research with others, and I get media inquiries from time to time. That's the professional side. I have a family, a house, and just lots of other things that require email correspondence.

It's not that the volume of messages needing a reply is so large (though sometimes that's an issue too) but rather the time and energy required is so large. Most things don't allow for a quick one-liner off the top of your head and then going back to work. In some cases, you have to do research and make sure stuff is followed up.

My situation is by no means unique. Be thankful if you don't have to deal with it, because a lot of us do, and it's not by choice.

ptero4• 7 months ago

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.

phantasmish2• 7 months ago

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).

andy99• 7 months ago

I’m with you, I’ve had a range of professional jobs, but rarely much meaningful correspondence via email. There are definitely emails that might announce some deadline or deliverable, but the “email” part of the work might be adding a calendar reminder or something, not responding to it. If feels like (I’m sure people will disagree) email would be more of a time sink for people who have a secretarial or personal assistant role, where they are being asked to do lots of little things (get me time with your boss this week type stuff). For a developer, whether IC or manager, most coordination would take place through other channels, and not be a material part of the work.

iberator• 7 months ago

You nailed it:

< FOR ME >

tra3• 7 months ago

Substitute Slack for Email?

aworks• 7 months ago

I'm a retired software manager. Email was inherent to the job as the primary way to communicate with people in far-flung countries. I'm guessing I spent 20% of my time in my inbox. Unfortunately, it wasn't in consecutive, large blocks but minutes of time interspersed with meetings, reading, etc. I tried and failed to read email only in larger sessions (although I did sit next to a manager on a plane once who plowed through their email in a single 3-hour session).

When I retired, it took me several years to refine my email use. I finally figured out Google inbox with Primary, Update, etc. tabs were my friend. I had to give up the habit of treating each email with intent. Maybe 1% require a thoughtful response, 10% are worth reading and the rest can be ignored. That was not true for work email, though.

xp844• 7 months ago

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.

muzani4• 7 months ago

My problem isn't with email or Slack. It's with WhatsApp and Telegram. It's the official channel for many things now, except it's not one channel, it's 50 or so. Wedding invites, family dinner invites, everything goes into there. They look no different to the overembellished spam about how (insert race) puts AIDS blood in our butter.

REALLY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS regarding my daughters' exams and schooling etc are in Telegram as well, sometimes WhatsApp. 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.

The good thing about Discord at least is I can be sure to ignore 100% of it and opt in any time I like.

The thing about emails is if I get too much spam from someone, I can unsubscribe. Same with social media. But I can't just block the gullible spammer uncle.

pavel_lishin• 7 months ago

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.

muzani4• 7 months ago

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.

tacker2000• 7 months ago

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.

chrisandchris• 7 months ago

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).

marcuskaz• 7 months ago

Do you have a school age child? My inbox is flooded with school updates, fund raisers, random questions, and is double when my two kids aren't at the same school.

parpfish2• 7 months ago

Many people have suggested strategies for dealing with this. One popular technique is Inbox Zero. The jokes about it suggests virtually nobody attains it, but I’m not even convinced it’s a virtue

I have inbox zero for personal and work emails. I can’t imagine living any other way.

BLKNSLVR3• 7 months ago

I propose Inbox Infinite.

Just use search. If search can't find it then the content wasn't descriptive enough and it is unimportant because the sender obviously didn't care enough to describe it properly.

Don't let lazy people make you more busy than you already are.

nradov7• 7 months ago

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.

fogzen2• 7 months ago

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.

TeMPOraL• 7 months ago

That would work, if Email search was reliable.

fogzen2• 7 months ago

Same. Both my personal and work inbox are currently empty. I think it’s easier than ever now that spam filters are so good.

I don’t have notifications enabled. I triage the inbox 1-3 times a day, outside of checking for an expected email. Triage means responding then archiving, deleting, or snoozing. It’s pretty easy so I’m always baffled by people who have thousands of emails in their inbox. I get the feeling they just don’t take action or don’t receive any real communication.

tracker13• 7 months ago

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.

parpfish2• 7 months ago

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”

dxdm3• 7 months ago

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.

carlosjobim• 7 months ago

My grandfather survived a Japanese prisoner of war camp when his mates died, simply because he always practiced inbox zero.

xandrius2• 7 months ago

I follow the mantra "Inbox <20". Inbox 0 is not flexible enough and freestyle Inbox is not manageable in the long term.

Together with filters, freely reporting as spam/unsubscribing, my Inbox <20 becomes a sort of todo list which I can review and handle whenever needed (this include flight/hotel bookings, getting back to complex emails, etc.).

abdullahkhalids• 7 months ago

When I was a prof, I used to get a lot of emails. My system was that every few hours I would go through all new emails in my inbox and archive all of them in the following fashion

- Some emails required a one line immediate response. I did that.

- Some emails required a longer reply. I tagged them (in Thunderbird) as ToDo and archived them.

- Some emails had information I would need at a later meeting. Tagged as TempInfo and archived.

- Most emails were read once and archived.

Now, inbox is zeroed. Next, can attack items in ToDo one by one, and untag them, so the ToDo list is always short. Similarly, as soon as the relevant meeting finished, untag TempInfo emails.

Now, I work somewhere where Slack is used, resulting in an endless deluge of messages that cannot be controlled.

xandrius2• 7 months ago

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

Pretty good, especially with sending delayed messages.

ryandrake• 7 months ago

My inbox at work is an ever-growing TODO list, only it's one that is written by other people. And my "Sent" folder is a list of people I need to "chase" to make sure they did what I asked them to do. I feel like this can take up as much of your work day as you let it: Getting to 10% of the things other people want me to do and nagging people who are, themselves, doing 10% of the things others are asking them to do.

dredmorbius3• 7 months ago

See Cory Doctorow's "suspense file" (adapted from GTD's tickler file) for addressing follow-ups:

<https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo>

Mathnerd314• 7 months ago

For me, the entire inbox is this DBTC folder. I have notifications set up on my smartwatch and I triage each email in real-time as it comes in. If it's urgent, I act on it. If it is important or I want to follow up, then I add it to my (separate) to-do list, with a Google tasks voice command. And otherwise I just ignore the notification and the email sits there in the inbox until I feel like dealing with it. I use the unread status and pick things off in occasional focus sessions. Some things never get "read", and that's because they don't matter. Zero bandit stuff because I know exactly what's in my inbox at any given time, at least up to what my analog brain can hold. It fits right into the old "I heard a noise. What is it?" routine humans used when we were hunter-gatherers.

purple_basilisk• 7 months ago

Came here to say this. When I'm really pressed for time, I use the custom stars in Gmail to indicate the type of followup needed - reply, separate task, etc.

dredmorbius3• 7 months ago

I've realised a few things dealing with time and attention, and devised a few strategies with varying degrees of success:

- Information consumes attention (as has been long observed).

- Corollary: excess information demands fast, cheap, regret-free rejection mechanisms. TFA describes several such approaches. The "DBTC" folder is one, but specifically refusing to use other, unmanageable, message queues (Twitter, FB, Slack, etc.) would be others. If a tool refuses to respect your boundaries, reject that tool.

- Time-blocking for low-urgency, but still significant tasks is useful. You're shifting from interrupt-driven mode to scheduled flow. This also means you can assess how your schedule relates to the incoming message flow, and whether or not that flow still exceeds your (now far more readily quantifiable) time devoted to it.

- There's still the question of how to prioritise items you're responding to. I'd suggest a rough triage method of:

1. Identifying high-priority senders (immediate family, work (management, colleagues, business relations), friends/social, and pretty much all else.

2. Randomly selecting from lower-priority queues is a way of fairly distributing your attention. If you can't do everything, sample a handful of items.

3. Quick "no"s (and learning how to phrase these delicately, if necessary) are useful. In some cases you might point the correspondent in a more useful direction. There's the physics professor's tactic of dealing with crackpot questions by directing them to one another, which preserves both attention and sanity....

My first exposure to the correspondence-limits problem came in one of the SF author Arthur C. Clarke's essay collections published in the 1970s or 1980s, in which he wrote of having had to resort to the tactic of responding to most of his own voluminous postal mail correspondence (and that international postal mail, for the most part, as he lived in Sri Lanka whilst most of his correspondents were elsewhere) with a pre-printed post-card with a set of checkboxes which answered most common inquiries. He'd already considered two further options: "Mr. Clarke regrets", and silence.

The future was not evenly distributed.

BLKNSLVR3• 7 months ago

Email is an ignorable communication medium. It has lost relevance due to its ubiquity, which led to its overuse, which led to its redundancy.

There are a lot of stragglers that haven't realized it's redundancy yet, and madly spend a significant percentage of their time and effort organizing this pulsating mass of ever-changing chaos.

If you keep replying, they'll keep asking.

Cut it down to a quick squizz once a day and get in with the actual productive work.

(My experience written as universal. I'm aware there are some important emails - but I challenge that there aren't as many as you think there are)

Edited to add: you can only work on one thing at a time. It should always be the highest priority item. If something comes in via email, there's little to no likelihood that it should be jumping to the top of the pile (email is not a real-time communication platform, and people who think it is should be corrected). An email is like the first pangs of hunger: at least 24 hours from becoming important.

tomrod• 7 months ago

I want to sign up for a service that charges people a penny to deliver an email to me -- otherwise the email is undeliverable. Even a minor cost to delivery will dramatically reduce spam.

BLKNSLVR3• 7 months ago

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

skrishnamurthi3• 7 months ago

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

Imustaskforhelp• 7 months ago

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.

klez• 7 months ago

I'm aware there are some important emails - but I challenge that there aren't as many as you think there are

The problem is not whether I think it's important. The problem is the customer thinking that's important. Or simply that I need to be aware of what they wrote. Or that I need to be aware of what another vendor wrote.

I'm not saying this is right, I'm saying it's where I'm currently sitting at.

nradov7• 7 months ago

That is idiotic advice. Email is absolutely not ignorable in any real business. We constantly receive important emails from customers / partners / vendors. If we ignored them then we would fail, and deservedly so. They have to be actioned quickly and with careful attention to detail.

its_ethan• 7 months ago

"you can only work on one thing at a time. It should always be the highest priority item"

The thing you're working on in any given moment is the highest priority thing (in "your" mind) by definition though. If you thought something else was higher priority, you would be doing it instead.

The only "argument" against that requires a third party who deems a different thing higher priority than what you're currently working on, and that leading to a mismatch of what is "highest" priority is, and you're lack of doing it in the moment.

stopandth1nk• 7 months ago

I have used something similar but for a slightly different problem. A long time ago (at the start of my career) I started using a folder called “Curious George” where I put all those really interesting emails with new ideas, trends, etc. The problem is not so much death by a thousand cuts but falling down a rabbit hole of some cool idea and losing an hour of focus. I collect all those dangerous emails and then go through them periodically. The difference is that none of these really require a direct response but some of them will result in me starting one of those annoying email chains that will steal others time - so it is much better to allocate time to read thoughtfully so I am only sending along the useful bits.

For those daily thieves of attention (described here) my approach is to use my inbox itself rather than a new folder. I leave them unread and archive the other garbage. Then I go through the unreads at a scheduled time. How well does this work for me? - not great. It works well enough but maybe I should try this idea instead. The biggest challenge with any of these methods is to develop the discipline to actually schedule and keep the time to review these things.

wrs2• 7 months ago

The author said they didn’t like Getting Things Done, then they almost literally reinvented Getting Things Done! Funny how sometimes an idea doesn’t click until you re-express it in your own words.

skrishnamurthi3• 7 months ago

Author here. That's not true.

GTD asks you to figure out now the action for each thing, think about how long that will take, figure out if it will take more than 2 (or N) minutes, and if ≤ that, do it now. The "do it now"s can add up to a lot of time and distraction. DBTC is the sorting step but without the "figure out the action" step or (most critically) the "do it now" step. And there's no reflection step, either.

So it's not "literally reinvented", not even "almost".

wrs2• 7 months ago

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.

dredmorbius3• 7 months ago

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.

tracker13• 7 months ago

I tend to try to approach inbox zero... that said, I will mark stuff left to be done as unread, and tend to get through most things within a few days... at least once a week I will hit 0 messages in my mailbox. I will sometimes move stuff to different docs/archives folders in email for later retrieval, but this is separate from a need to respond to now.

elieskilled• 7 months ago

Love it. One of the major challenges with email is that a lot of disparate content is mixed together.

I run a product called Inbox Zero (if you google the term we're the ones that come up first). I often suggest to users that they aim for "Reply Zero". They might get 100 emails per day, but only 5 need a reply. As long as those are handled they're probably good.

One of the challenges people face is that there's so much noise mixed together. Newsletter, conversations, receipts,... what you call "DBTC", and it's time consuming to sort it into buckets. And frankly, before AI it might not have been worth the effort. But with AI assistance, it's actually very doable. Inbox Zero offers it, as do a bunch of others. What you call DBTC could potentially be sorted for you into that folder automatically.

PS. not trying to shill our own product. It's open source so you can even self-host it without paying us anything.

tempestn• 7 months ago

Sounds like you've invented your own spin on GTD, while thinking of it as something else. If that works for you, more power to you!

JackSlateur• 7 months ago

"Mindlessly dashing off replies to get them out of my inbox is neither an option nor desirable."

But the "zero inbox" has nothing to do with "Mindlessly dashing off replies to get them out of my inbox"

It is all about treating your inbox as a todolist

Your inbox is a bandit problem

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