Use Feedly to reduce noise in your inbox
TL; DR
Unsubscribe from all your newsletters, marketing emails, and product updates and use Feedly to stay up-to-date with those websites instead.
Just so you know I am not in any way sponsored or affiliated with Feedly, its just a good app.
Problem
We are in the information age where the only way to survive is to ruthlessly prioritise where we spend our attention. In this age, information overload is a real concern and I found one of its primary attack vectors was via my email inbox.
For good or ill, email is my primary information feed, I check it everyday and am not happy unless I am at inbox zero because that implies that I am not yet ‘up-to-date’ and may be missing some important information.
However I realised that it had become an anxiety-inducing daily task to read all my emails. It seemed silly to feel this way towards a tool that is meant to enhance my life. Technology should serve us not burden us.
I sat down to tackle this problem and realised that there are 3 types of communication that land in my inbox.
- Human. These are written by other humans and are usually the most important ones to read.
- Imperative. These are ones that I must open in order to achieve a goal such as email confirmations, 2-factor authentication codes, and delivery notifications.
- Opportunistic. These represent opportunities and include newsletters, marketing emails, and product updates.
The problem is that opportunistic information is not at all essential to the daily administration of my life, it is information that I do not need to be 'up-to-date’ with. Not only is it non-essential, it’s actually an obstacle to the consumption of imperative information and is therefore a blocker to productivity. Fear of missing out makes this information addictive and therefore unhealthy.
Why should we keep the worst possible distractions right next to the information we least want to be distracted from? It’s the informational equivalent of keeping your sweets next to your salads (Google showed that accessibility of sugary snacks increases consumption so they should be tucked away in the naughty cupboard out of sight, the same applies to information).
My argument is therefore that imperative and opportunistic information belong in distinct places and should be treated very differently. The features in my email client (Gmail) reinforce the notion that opportunistic information does not belong there.
- Tagging and archiving.
- Explicit deletion.
- Auto-complete.
These are features that make sense for human and imperative communications but not opportunistic ones — does anyone tag and archive their newsletters?
Solution
I found the perfect solution in another app that I always thought highly of but rarely used: Feedly.
Feedly is described as a ‘news aggregator’. It was originally developed to consume RSS feeds but now it is able to turn almost any URL into a ‘feed’. Almost all the information I receive in opportunistic communications is also available on the ‘news’, ‘blog’, or ‘home’ page of the website that sent it to me so its easy to set up feeds of that same information.
Once you’ve done this you’ll notice Feedly has features much more suited for navigating a sea of opportunistic information.
- No concept of explicit deletion, there is only “read” and “unread”.
- Mark all as read in two taps / clicks.
- A layout that allows you to scroll through many items with a glance rather than having to open individual items.
These features emphasise the low priority nature of opportunistic information making your relationship to it much healthier. You can easily scroll through and dismiss the majority of the information to more quickly get to the few nuggets that interest you.
This solution is nothing more than a simple example of “the right tool for the right job”. I hope it helps you to combat information overload as it has done for me dear reader. Download Feedly and reduce noise in your inbox!
