Don't Snooze

Mailbox is a new iPhone email app that grabbed a lot of attention recently, partly because of their waiting list for using it. It's a gmail-only system that stores copies of your email on Mailbox's servers, so they can do new features beyond the standard mail client. Even though I got through the waiting list a week ago, I haven't tried it myself, because I wasn't

I have a few religious beliefs about email. One is that processing incoming email is different from

that you should only process a message once - when you first see it, you should decide what to do next with it, even if that's "read it again later",

I call it a religion because I believe it, but I don't always practice it. I have an inbox full of things I've looked at once and am procrastinating on, partly because it's hard to move things to the todo list that I use from Gmail. It annoys me every time I look at my email, and I've forgotten important things that I left sitting there. This is exactly why I think it's important that our tools encourage good habits, instead of encoding bad ones.

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