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The War on Email

By Adrianne Jeffries 10/11/11 8:45am

The War on Email

Mr. Ohanian. (source: Google+)

Inbox Heroes: Alexis Ohanian, Co-Founder of Reddit and Breadpig

It took Betabeat about seven months to finally meet Alexis Ohanian after we first chatted by email. The Y Combinator alum and Reddit co-founder-turned-advisor is always about town, but he spends a good chunk of time traveling between New York and San Francisco. And between helping out with Bay Area-based Hipmunk, coordinating events for his uncorporation Breadpig and accepting various awards such as being named to Inc.’s 30 Under 30 list, we’re amazed that he ever answers our Gchats. And considering Mr. Ohanian also frequently receives email from entrepreneurs looking for advice and VCs wanting coffee, we shudder to imagine his inbox. So we asked him one question: how do you do it? Read More

By Guest Post 10/06/11 3:32pm

The War on Email

Mr. Hurst. (Photo: Steve Worth)

Inbox Heroes: Mark Hurst, Author of Bit Literacy

This is a guest post from Mark Hurst – creator of Good Todo, founder of customer experience consultancy Creative Good, author of the Good Experience blog, host of the Gel conference and author of Bit Literacy, free in the Apple iBookstore.

Here’s a complaint I hear disturbingly often: “I’m really stressed by the 10,000 emails in my inbox, but I don’t have time to do anything about it.” Countless users worldwide face stress and anxiety daily as they wonder what important item might be missing in the crowded chaos of their email inbox.

Ironically enough, many productivity systems only add to the stress. You know the kind: “Just add plug-in X, configure setting Y, install widget Z, and use this particular app and this 19-step process and you’ll *begin* to get a handle on it.” This may work well for software engineers who debug compilers for fun, but the other 99.9 percent of users are unlikely to adopt such a complicated system, no matter how effective it is for the elite few who can get it up and running.

Let’s be realistic. Most people need a system that solves their email overload but *doesn’t* require a lot of time to learn or special tools to install. People want something simple, quick to learn, easy to use, and not dependent on one particular platform.

If this sounds right, I’ve got the system for you. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 9/30/11 9:34am

The War on Email

Mr. Meisel

Inbox Heroes: For Ari Meisel, Co-Founder of Less Doing, Email Is a Game

Ari Meisel is a serial entrepreneur, triathlete, author and inventor. As co-founder of Less Doing, one his areas of focus is making all life and business tasks more efficient.

When someone asks me what I do for a living I typically say I’m a real estate developer. While thats true it’s one of several things I like to keep myself busy with. I’m a green building consultant, a serial entrepreneur on my 7th company, a triathlete, wellness expert, inventor, and author. All that really means is I get lots and lots of email everyday and they usually cover a broad range of topics. One of my companies is called Less Doing, which I co-founded with Jameson Detweiller. We believe that there is a better way to do everything. We try to attack every problem with tactics falling under three categories. Optimize, Automate, Outsource. The entire point of everything we do is to free up time and more importantly brain power so you can do other more enjoyable things with your resources. Read More

By Guest Post 9/28/11 9:39am

The War on Email

Mr. Cieplak.

Inbox Heroes: How to Appreciate Email While Also Telling It to Fuck Off

This is a guest post from Gordon Cieplak, Creative Director at 8tracks and the principal of Handsome Code. You can find him @gordoncc on Twitter and grdn.cc on Tumblr, his preferred methods of distraction.

Gordon Cieplak, web designer

Email is awesome. It is the foundation for all electronic communication. (You know, after things like math, transistors, TCP/IP, etc.) Basically, every ‘tech start-up’ in New York is an elaborate way to send an email that says ‘Hey, look at me!’ or ‘Hey, look at this stuff I like!’

That said, like anything awesome that man has invented (and I mean man, not woman, you raucous ‘change the ratio’ maniacs), it ends up becoming more of a chore than the incredible and liberating tool that it is.  But we (both men and women) only have ourselves to blame, the technology is not the culprit.

So, if you get lots of email and it’s a pain in the ass to deal with it and you feel like a ‘hero’ when you can manage, you are not an ‘inbox hero.’  You’re just a technologically confused asshole, like most of us. This column really should be called ‘inbox assholes,’ though that sounds like the name of a niche porn site.  But I digress. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 9/23/11 5:11pm

The War on Email

Balázs Szabó, Gmail hacker. (Photo: Google+)

Inbox Heroes: Tips From the Ultimate Gmail Hackers, the Gmail Team Itself

Sarah Price, Gmail’s community manager, weighed in on the first installment of Betabeat’s how-we-email-now series on Google+. She had a few tips–Priority Inbox is highly customizable, she emphasizes–but she pointed us to the ultimate in Gmail mastery: Gmail engineer Balázs Szabó recently up his own Gmail productivity flow. We read it and we were all like, “woah.” Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 9/21/11 4:12pm

The War on Email

gmail screengrab

Inbox Heroes: A New Series on Betabeat for Those of Us Who ‘Get a Lot of Email’


Email. There is so much of it already, and more is being created all the time. Some folks have even declared email bankruptcy; others have simply refused to use it anymore. For Inbox Heroes, Betabeat is curious about your war stories, productivity tips and moments of extraordinary email. Send us an email to tips et betabeat daught com with “war on email” in the subject line and a paragraph or two (or more!) about how you deal with your influx of electronic letters. Here, I’ll start! Read More