I’ve been reminded of something Paul Graham said in his Dangerously Ambitious Startup Ideas essay, about how email is becoming a grossly inefficient to-do list for most people, and it could be worth instigating a whole new to-do protocol from the ground up, which had the degenerate case email equivalent of “to-do: read the following text”.
So I’ve started looking through my emails to see what messages I receive which are essentially “read this text”. It’s become quite apparent that there aren’t that many, and most of them are requests or suggestions to do something else online, (one point for Paul Graham), but there are a few obvious examples where this does happen, such as event itineraries, e-tickets, boarding passes, etc. These tend to be de facto documents, though, so it’s not especially insightful.
I’ve been reminded of something Paul Graham said in his Dangerously Ambitious Startup Ideas essay, about how email is becoming a grossly inefficient to-do list for most people, and it could be worth instigating a whole new to-do protocol from the ground up, which had the degenerate case email equivalent of “to-do: read the following text”.
So I’ve started looking through my emails to see what messages I receive which are essentially “read this text”. It’s become quite apparent that there aren’t that many, and most of them are requests or suggestions to do something else online, (one point for Paul Graham), but there are a few obvious examples where this does happen, such as event itineraries, e-tickets, boarding passes, etc. These tend to be de facto documents, though, so it’s not especially insightful.