Email notifications philsosophy

Akrasia
10

I think we’re mostly agreeing:

  • the current hack of entering –1 to permanently disable reminders is needlessly opaque
  • on eep days when I’ve got the activity planned, I’d like to be able to silence Zeno

The first is a UI #UVI. The second strikes me as a special case of the Uncle button (however it gets exposed), but for folks with fairly regular habits there may be possible solutions with the currently available settings.

Most of the time, when I find Zeno emails annoying it’s because I’ve annoyingly (and often inexplicably, akratically) not done the thing.

So I also firmly agree with Danny:

Aside: when I read his response (this morning!) in that thread, I thought it had missed the point at hand and not addressed the quotes that it was replying to. So I’m glad that we’ve got this side-thread to thresh it out.

I have an unverified hypothesis that there are appropriate goal settings to achieve both aims. Reminders arriving when you need them and minimising unwanted emails.

There are three settings that come to mind:

  • the ability to disable reminders, albeit with the not-very-visible –1 hack. No unwanted emails, but no potentially useful emails either. Handy for goals that are always eeping.

  • the ability to specify the time of the first reminder. Handy for reminding me of things that I would like to have done earlier in the day, but may have forgotten about.

  • the ability to specify the deadline time. Unless you’ve got the habit of going right to the wire, pushing this to later than my ideal-target time will usefully reduce the number of Zeno emails without impacting productivity.

Zeno emails become increasingly frequent as the deadline approaches. That’s a bit micro-managery, repeatedly telling you something that you’re already all-too-aware of. I hope that changing the deadline will eliminate a lot of those. And the ability to silence or derail a goal (i.e. uncle!) that’s planned-for or planned-not.

The levers that we have access to have changed, but we knew that any ‘revamp’ of reminders was unlikely to leave [the subset of levers that we’d become comfortable with using] unchanged. I’m going to experiment a bit and see whether my hypothesis holds up for my own goals.

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