> Fixing the hive-mind is going to be a billion dollar industry
Cal Newport was one of the inspirations for https://inboxwhenready.org. At this point, people have paid me over $100K to make it harder for them to read their email.
I've made some effort to persuade the Gmail and Superhuman teams to take this issue seriously, but to no avail, yet. If anyone here is building an email client or popular Gmail extension, I'm happy to talk about this stuff whenever.
You know 17 years ago I used to work at a company that only delivered email at 5 minutes before the hour (9:55, 10:55, etc) and then didn’t deliver email at all between 9pm and sometime in the morning like 4am or 5am. It was amazing. Email from customers were delivered immediately as were internal emails if you marked it high importance (with the “!”).
I'd like a way to get bulk new notifications pushed to me as a small popup in the bottom right of my screen once every 1-2 hours, if there's new emails during that window. That eliminates the need to check the time to see if it's 9:56am yet and I need to check my email.
This is what I want from Thunderbird from the receiver end. The most you can do is set the interval at which to check for new messages. But I want to specify some times at which mail is retrieved.
Of course, having the organization agreement where you know your email won't be delivered till a specified time would be even better. But that's beyond my control.
Yes, it collects your email when you install. This lets me send a couple onboarding messages and determine what plan you are on. There's more info in the (human readable) privacy policy.
When I started this project I wanted the onboarding experience to be as simple as possible, i.e. no annoying sign up stage. I wondered whether this approach would lead to lots of questions like yours: in fact, I think less than 5 people have asked about this since 2015. My sense is that, on balance, most people benefit from the "install = sign-up" flow.
In 2015, the European Commission published a report which included the following [1]:
> We believe that societies must protect, cherish and nurture humans’ attentional capabilities. This does not mean giving up searching for improvements: that shall always be useful. Rather, we assert that attentional capabilities are a finite, precious and rare asset. In the digital economy, attention is approached as a commodity to be exchanged on the market place, or to be channelled in work processes. But this instrumental approach to attention neglects the social and political dimensions of it, i.e., the fact that the ability and the right to focus our own attention is a critical and necessary condition for autonomy, responsibility, reflexivity, plurality, engaged presence, and a sense of meaning. To the same extent that organs should not be exchanged on the market place, our attentional capabilities deserve protective treatment. Respect for attention should be linked to fundamental rights such as privacy and bodily integrity, as attentional capability is an inherent element of the relational self for the role it plays in the development of language, empathy, and collaboration. We believe that, in addition to offering informed choices, the default settings and other designed aspects of our technologies should respect and protect attentional capabilities.
(The report was co-authored by Luciano Floridi, who is supervising James Williams' PhD at Oxford.)
> If this is true Then it also presents a unique opportunity. I.e. There should be a very real and observable productivity boost from being able to ignore
B J Fogg, who gets brief mention in this article, teaches his students to cause behaviour by making the behaviour easy and then delivering timely triggers [1]. If you find yourself behaving in ways you don't reflectively endorse, your basic approach should be to flip the Fogg model upside down – avoid triggers and make it harder.
In my own case, that's meant disabling notifications and blocking websites and apps. I also hacked a Chrome extension which applies the "avoid triggers and make it harder" idea to Gmail [2]. The extension has several thousand users, many of whom reclaim 30-60 minutes of focussed work each week which would otherwise be lost to compulsive inbox processing.
Easier than avoiding triggers -- and almost as effective -- is just to delay the response. Let yourself check your phone, but only 10 minutes after you feel the urge to do so.
This is much easier than complete abstinence, but breaks down the habit-forming link between trigger and instant gratification.
And just as you say, it's something I started doing after reading about training [1] and inverting the priciples
If you enjoyed the article and want a more detailed discussion, James Williams gave a talk on this topic at the RSA in May [1], and did an interview with David Runciman in July [2].
Which is interesting, and thanks for the links, but this isn't what the Economist is talking about. The Economist is talking about the mis-allocation of labor - not a problem for the producer, not a problem for the consumer, a problem for the person that has to tot up the stats and make it fit the framework of capitalism.
It is almost like people don't even care about the actual article, and only read what they want to see....
From the transcript of the TED talk [1] mentioned in the OP:
> So how do we fix this? We need to make three radical changes to technology and to our society.
> The first is we need to acknowledge that we are persuadable. Once you start understanding that your mind can be scheduled into having little thoughts or little blocks of time that you didn't choose, wouldn't we want to use that understanding and protect against the way that that happens? I think we need to see ourselves fundamentally in a new way. It's almost like a new period of human history, like the Enlightenment, but almost a kind of self-aware Enlightenment, that we can be persuaded, and there might be something we want to protect.
> The second is we need new models and accountability systems so that as the world gets better and more and more persuasive over time -- because it's only going to get more persuasive -- that the people in those control rooms are accountable and transparent to what we want. The only form of ethical persuasion that exists is when the goals of the persuader are aligned with the goals of the persuadee. And that involves questioning big things, like the business model of advertising.
> Lastly, we need a design renaissance, because once you have this view of human nature, that you can steer the timelines of a billion people -- just imagine, there's people who have some desire about what they want to do and what they want to be thinking and what they want to be feeling and how they want to be informed, and we're all just tugged into these other directions. And you have a billion people just tugged into all these different directions. Well, imagine an entire design renaissance that tried to orchestrate the exact and most empowering time-well-spent way for those timelines to happen. And that would involve two things: one would be protecting against the timelines that we don't want to be experiencing, the thoughts that we wouldn't want to be happening, so that when that ding happens, not having the ding that sends us away; and the second would be empowering us to live out the timeline that we want.
Is the point supposed to be that his proposed solution is impossible to implement and flies in the face of market and incentive-driven behavior? When I think "three step proposal" I think of something actionable by an individual, not something that would have to be enacted on by basically a totalitarian government.
I bought an iPad Pro recently, so I can leave the 16" plugged in at the office.