I am bad at email. Maybe everyone is. But I feel like I’m worse than most; or at least worse than I want to be. I feel like my inbox should do a better job helping me find emails that are important. I use Gmail and Priority Inbox, so I don’t mean “important” in that sense (emails from close contacts). By important, I mean things like:
Conversations where “the ball is in my court” (hard to discern programmatically perfectly)
Conversations that I initiated — then the person wrote back — but then I didn’t write back to (similar to #1 but easier to identify, and more important)
Emails that I have not responded to yet at all
Emails from important people, where important takes into account other data such as: twitter followers (total, in common), linkedin connection, etc.
probably a few other smart ways I’m not thinking of right now.
I have been thinking about this a bit after reading somewhere (I think in Venture Deals) that Brad Feld and his partners read and respond to every inbound email every day. That’s pretty impressive. I am not there yet. But I like the idea a lot. So today I did set up a little gmail query to try and help with that: newer_than:1d and is:important This gives me a view of all the emails that I received in the last day. It’s a start. But it’s not perfect. It doesn’t give me is a view of conversations I have not participated in yet. I tried adding a filter such like: -from:me, to try and exclude any threads that I’ve participated in, but that doesn’t do the trick. So I what I see is a list of all the emails that came in today, including every email I sent. Which is not what I’m looking for. I complained about this to Fred the other day, suggesting that there’s still an opportunity to build a product (along the lines of SaneBox or Gmail Meter) that really solves the inbox problem. It’s such an important problem for so many people, and it’s still so far from perfect. His response was that there’s a fear of investing in things that are too close to the core of the email platforms. I am not sure I agree, but it does seem that there still isn’t a perfect solution, so maybe that’s the reason. In summary, I would love to see: a) a simple gmail query parameter that lets me find conversations in which I am not yet a participant (I feel like this must exist!) or b) a smarter view of my inbox — perhaps one that is another kind of visualization besides a list — that takes into account these other important factors. I’d pay good money for that! Update: this query is pretty good: newer_than:7d is:important in:inbox
Yesterday Uber made me feel like a superhero.
It was about 10 degrees in Boston, and I was on the T on my way into Cambridge. And as we pulled in to Kenmore station the conductor notified us that all Green Line trains would be going out of service. So my train — and every train before us and after us — dumped all of its passengers out into the freezing cold to find another way to get wherever they were going.
There were a few shuttle buses, but they barely made a dent in moving the crowd. Every single taxi was full. After a few minutes, there were easily over a thousand people huddling outside in the freezing cold trying to figure out what to do.
I reached into my pocked and tried Hailo, but all taxis in the area were booked. Uber gave the same response — but on my second try I was able to snag an Uber car. So: five minutes later, I got a phone call and a black Lincoln pulled up next to me. I offered to share it w/ the group of people directly next to me, but no one was going my way. So I hopped in and was whisked away from an overcrowded frozen nightmare in a warm, comfortable car.
Totally made me feel like a superhero.
But not necessarily in a “save the world” way — more of a “wow I have a superpower” way.
Happy MLK Day everyone. I just spent the last half hour reading MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. To be totally honest, I don’t think I’ve ever read it in its entirety before. It is incredibly powerful and moving. I encourage anyone reading this to take some time with it today. I pulled a few quotes here. King’s letter makes the case — in exceedingly eloquent and persuasive terms — for nonviolent direct action in the face of injustice. And discusses the historical precedent and moral imperative for distinguishing between just and unjust laws (including a framework for drawing that distinction), and for disobeying unjust laws. It hammers home the point that we can’t blindly accept “the law” if we don’t take into account the context in which it was created or the morality and justice of the ends it seeks. Part of the beauty of it is the guided tour of the history of changemaking, conflict and progress that Dr. King takes us on — all the way from Socrates, to the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution, to the Holocaust, to of course the Civil Rights movement. It’s kind of incredible the extent to which we have to learn and re-learn the dynamics of societal norms and the process by which we arrive at and live under the rule of law. At the heart of the letter is tension between a moderate “take it slow” approach (embodied at the time by the white southern church, whose leaders the letter was addressed to) and more extreme “force change now” approach (embodied at the time by Elijah Muhammed’s Muslim movement). King’s articulation of the rationale for a measured and pure — yet intentionally impatient — nonviolent approach is incredibly thoughtful and reasoned. It’s part inspiration and part how-to for anyone working to create positive change in the face of resistance from the status quo. I can’t equate the civil rights movement with the digital rights movement, and I won’t do that here. But that is the corner of the activism world that I sit in, so it’s the lens that I’m reading this through. And I can’t help but think about the passing of
