[HN Gopher] Your inbox is a bandit problem
___________________________________________________________________
Your inbox is a bandit problem
Author : zdw
Score : 64 points
Date : 2025-12-22 04:04 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (parentheticallyspeaking.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (parentheticallyspeaking.org)
| sambishop wrote:
| I've always been fascinated by people who seem to have this
| problem. I've heard multiple individuals describe responding to
| emails as an infinite attention suck sort of like doomscrolling.
| For me, email is 99% updates/promotions, 0.99% real humans that I
| can hit with a one liner, and 0.01% humans that really require a
| thoughtful response. Something must happen to these email people
| where they grow prominent enough and advertise their address
| enough that they get inundated with genuine email that is all
| from thoughtful humans? Feels like a problem I would enjoy
| having, at least for a while.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It generally tends to happen if you either do enough stuff
| publicly, or own a business.
|
| It's always nice when people reach out but it can also kinda
| tend to pile up and become a source of feelings of guilt about
| stuff you didn't reply to (and all of the sudden it's 16 months
| later and replying this late feels awkward).
| 1123581321 wrote:
| It greatly depends on your job, and it doesn't have to be a
| glamorous job, just one where people request things of you or
| you of them. For example, a friend is a corporate buyer,
| somewhat low in his organization, and receives about 120 emails
| from humans each workday. (His strategy is to select all the
| emails he will handle that day, put them in a folder, and call
| himself done when that folder is empty. I.e., he almost never
| sends a same day response.)
| kgwxd wrote:
| my personal email is like yours. my work email is like the
| post.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > For me, email is 99% updates/promotions, 0.99% real humans
|
| That sounds like personal email more than the work email
| discussed in the article. And if that's truly the split of your
| work email, seems like all you need is some server side inbox
| filters to manage that.
| hammock wrote:
| I wonder why spam in personal email is acceptable but spam in
| work email is not. Why can't we do both?
| hammock wrote:
| Why am I downvoted? Did people think I was suggesting spam
| in both?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Work email will be very different from job to job as well.
| Many orgs have basically declared bankruptcy on email and
| moved peofessional communication to other channels.
|
| For the last decade my work email has been basically
| notifications, with sometimes a single or two emails
| thoughtfully written by a human. And that's probably because
| anything people expect me to read will be either in
| Slack/whatever chat app, in a ticket/task, or straight in a
| calendar invite with an agenda to get up to speed.
|
| Funny thing is emails are now either only relevant for a few
| miliseconds where I only need to know what triggered it, or
| ultra important "we'll delete your account in 5 days" type
| that I absolutely don't want to miss. In a year I haven't got
| anything in between.
| phantasmish wrote:
| My work email is barely better. If it matters it reaches me
| in Teams (ugh, unfortunately). Email is full of spam, most of
| it company-internal (no I don't give a shit about yet another
| "newsletter" that you probably had an LLM write anyway,
| because why wouldn't you, because it's fake work anyway)
| bachmeier wrote:
| I can give you an idea of why it's so terrible. I'm a professor
| that teaches multiple classes, I run our department's grad
| programs, I do various kinds of service activities within the
| university, I'm the editor of a journal, I collaborate on
| research with others, and I get media inquiries from time to
| time. That's the professional side. I have a family, a house,
| and just lots of other things that require email
| correspondence.
|
| It's not that the volume of messages needing a reply is so
| large (though sometimes that's an issue too) but rather the
| time and energy required is so large. Most things don't allow
| for a quick one-liner off the top of your head and then going
| back to work. In some cases, you have to do research and make
| sure stuff is followed up.
|
| My situation is by no means unique. Be thankful if you don't
| have to deal with it, because a lot of us do, and it's not by
| choice.
| ptero wrote:
| What you describe is a job that requires a lot of thoughtful,
| or at least meaningful, answers to a lot of people. If each
| answer leads to a context switch, this lands hard on any
| other work you do. On the comms side, this may well be a full
| time job; or more.
|
| But the problem has nothing to do with email. The problem is
| with combining what sounds like a full time management job
| with a full time teaching job. In fact email makes it
| possible to batch those requests instead of always being
| interrupted at an external schedule.
|
| And sorry -- I am not trying to tell you how to live your
| life, what comes next is just an engineering observation. But
| if one is overloaded the solution is almost always to ...
| reduce load. Transfer some duties and/or delegate more tasks
| and/or hire someone to help, etc. This is usually not easy,
| but IME most folks under overload who say they cannot reduce
| it either (1) did not try to reduce it in earnest or (2) are
| micromanagers who are willing to delegate only partway while
| maintaining the role in final decisions. My 2c.
| nradov wrote:
| You're not wrong, but university professors don't
| necessarily have the authority or budget to hire
| assistants. And much of the stuff they deal with absolutely
| requires their unique skills: delegation leads to errors
| and omissions with serious consequences.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| Then they have to use what power they have and simply
| partition the workload into what must be done that is
| actually doable and the rest. The rest gets done if there
| is time, otherwise it just gets dropped.
|
| If the institution wants more work done that there is
| time for in a normal working day then they simply have to
| hire more people like any normal company would do. If the
| institution cannot afford to hire more people then it
| simply has to admit that there are limits to what it can
| commit to doing.
|
| This is what unions are for.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| You overestimate delegation opportunities for most
| teachers. With what money?
|
| As for reducing: research, grad programs, journals, media
| inquiries - these are not optional for profs
|
| You are accustomed to professional managerial class
| luxuries that are unavailable to most hard working folks
| swores wrote:
| Agree with you but would add that even on the
| professional managerial side it is indeed a luxury - yes
| for many people it would be possible, but there's also
| many people (in startups, or small businesses, or not
| small but struggling businesses) whose options are as
| limited as teachers.
|
| Some of whom might have good options for changing jobs,
| or good hopes of things improving in the near future, but
| for many it would be the lesser evil compared to trying
| to find a different job with the same positives (whether
| salary or other motivation) but without those negatives.
| ptero wrote:
| > As for reducing: research, grad programs, journals,
| media inquiries - these are not optional for profs
|
| For a tenured professor (and someone who runs the
| department's grad program and teaches many classes almost
| certainly has a tenure) _all_ of those are optional.
| During my PhD I have seen all sorts of arrangements,
| including tenured profs who taught minimum load and did
| nothing else. No grad students, no special courses, no
| seminars, nada. I am not advocating this. It is, in my
| book, not a good approach unless you spending all other
| time to solve Riemannian Hypothesis or something like
| this. But tenure gives a prof _a lot_ of leeway on how
| much to work and what to work on. My 2c.
| skrishnamurthi wrote:
| I'm the author of the original article, I'm a tenured
| professor, and none of these things is optional for me.
| Indeed, I wrote this article several years into being a
| full professor, because my obligations had only _grown_ ,
| not reduced, by virtue of all the promotions. Of course
| different people have different senses of how "obliged"
| they are or should be.
| muzani wrote:
| My mom simply did not respond to emails from students. Or
| even her faculty. It worked fine for her, except many
| people considered it rude, but nothing bad happened
| otherwise. She had an office, an actual one, and whenever
| it was important enough, people went to the office.
| nradov wrote:
| The school should have fired your mom. Students don't
| always have free time that aligns with instructor office
| hours, and some issues are best addressed in writing.
| Whether they like it or not, communicating with students
| through a variety of channels is absolutely part of a
| teacher's job. Those who don't want to do it should find
| another line of work.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Do you expect your mechanic to open their shop at 10pm to
| work on your car around your schedule?
| dgacmu wrote:
| This is a misunderstanding of the job of a professor. (I
| have some experience here.)
|
| Our job is to teach well enough, to research well enough,
| and to handle administrative stuff well enough, in a
| context where any one of those could easily be a full
| time job and it's impossible to do all of them perfectly.
|
| Having a work pattern in which the less important stuff
| falls through the cracks while making sure the important
| stuff gets handled is necessary and common. As long as
| people understand your pattern and can work within it
| it's generally ok.
| phantasmish wrote:
| > I have a family, a house, and just lots of other things
| that require email correspondence.
|
| Weird how much this can differ. I have those things and
| sometimes go months without looking at my email. 99.99% of
| messages I care about are in one of two messaging apps, or
| some app or another reads what matters from email for me so I
| don't actually read the email myself (mostly shipping
| updates).
| andy99 wrote:
| I'm with you, I've had a range of professional jobs, but rarely
| much meaningful correspondence via email. There are definitely
| emails that might announce some deadline or deliverable, but
| the "email" part of the work might be adding a calendar
| reminder or something, not responding to it. If feels like (I'm
| sure people will disagree) email would be more of a time sink
| for people who have a secretarial or personal assistant role,
| where they are being asked to do lots of little things (get me
| time with your boss this week type stuff). For a developer,
| whether IC or manager, most coordination would take place
| through other channels, and not be a material part of the work.
| iberator wrote:
| You nailed it:
|
| < FOR ME >
| tra3 wrote:
| Substitute Slack for Email?
| aworks wrote:
| I'm a retired software manager. Email was inherent to the job
| as the primary way to communicate with people in far-flung
| countries. I'm guessing I spent 20% of my time in my inbox.
| Unfortunately, it wasn't in consecutive, large blocks but
| minutes of time interspersed with meetings, reading, etc. I
| tried and failed to read email only in larger sessions
| (although I did sit next to a manager on a plane once who
| plowed through their email in a single 3-hour session).
|
| When I retired, it took me several years to refine my email
| use. I finally figured out Google inbox with Primary, Update,
| etc. tabs were my friend. I had to give up the habit of
| treating each email with intent. Maybe 1% require a thoughtful
| response, 10% are worth reading and the rest can be ignored.
| That was not true for work email, though.
| xp84 wrote:
| I'm a software manager at present - honestly I just ignore
| email. I do get some emails from customers, but they're
| supposed to be communicating through proper channels so their
| customer success managers need to at minimum be on cc. So if
| anything is important people can Slack me (including to say
| "check your email for..."), and if there's an action needed,
| I'll click the little bookmark to add the message to the
| "Later" section till the issue has been addressed. I won't in
| any way claim that I'm well organized, but I am proud that I
| don't need to spend more than 20 minutes a week on email,
| because I hate email.
| muzani wrote:
| My problem isn't with email or Slack. It's with WhatsApp and
| Telegram. It's the official channel for many things now, except
| it's not one channel, it's 50 or so. Wedding invites, family
| dinner invites, everything goes into there. They look no
| different to the overembellished spam about how (insert race)
| puts AIDS blood in our butter.
|
| _REALLY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS_ regarding my daughters '
| exams and schooling etc are in Telegram as well, sometimes
| WhatsApp. Some schools are well aware of the problem and have
| spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing an app that
| isn't even an app, so now we have to head into yet another app-
| site to pick up the kids and get updates on schooling.
|
| The good thing about Discord at least is I can be sure to
| ignore 100% of it and opt in any time I like.
|
| The thing about emails is if I get too much spam from someone,
| I can unsubscribe. Same with social media. But I can't just
| block the gullible spammer uncle.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _Some schools are well aware of the problem and have spent
| hundreds of thousands of dollars developing an app that isn
| 't even an app, so now we have to head into yet another app-
| site to pick up the kids and get updates on schooling._
|
| Our local school seems to switch apps every year, steadily
| getting worse with each update until this year when they
| switched to something that's the least-bad of the lot.
|
| Every time, I start thinking to myself: maybe I can just
| fucking write an app for them to use that wouldn't be a
| usability nightmare. But then I come to my senses, and
| realize that I absolutely don't want to maintain an app for a
| single customer, set up email, sms, etc., store data safely
| in compliance with the various regulations. So I just go back
| to grumbling.
| muzani wrote:
| For a moment I think, maybe I'm exaggerating. So I open up
| Telegram.
|
| I wish HN allowed me to drop images, but basically, there's
| this "NEW SCHOOL TRANSITION" channel for my daughter who's
| switching schools.
|
| 95% of the channel is just user join spam. Yesterday someone
| dropped several PDFs. The title of these files is something
| like OZ36824106181121.pdf
|
| Wtf is this file? I open it and it's a list of textbooks to
| buy. The school shop is open 29 Dec - 5 Jan, except in
| weekends. But some groups are to buy these books after 20
| Jan. Am I in that group?
|
| There is no CTA - do I need to buy this and when? We have a
| textbook borrowing scheme. Does the new school not do
| textbook borrowing?
|
| This is not my only child. This is how DBTC gets me.
| marcuskaz wrote:
| Do you have a school age child? My inbox is flooded with school
| updates, fund raisers, random questions, and is double when my
| two kids aren't at the same school.
| parpfish wrote:
| > Many people have suggested strategies for dealing with this.
| One popular technique is Inbox Zero. The jokes about it suggests
| virtually nobody attains it, but I'm not even convinced it's a
| virtue
|
| I have inbox zero for personal and work emails. I can't imagine
| living any other way.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I propose Inbox Infinite.
|
| Just use search. If search can't find it then the content
| wasn't descriptive enough and it is unimportant because the
| sender obviously didn't care enough to describe it properly.
|
| Don't let lazy people make you more busy than you already are.
| nradov wrote:
| Sometimes the lazy people have money that you want, or are
| gatekeepers on getting money from others. So you have to
| accommodate their laziness if you want to eat.
| fogzen wrote:
| That only works if you don't receive any real communication
| where people expect a response, right? I think that is the
| case for most people.
|
| If you don't actually communicate with email then Inbox
| Infinite seems the way to go. You only go in to search for a
| confirmation code or receipt for something. This is how I
| observe most people using email.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That would work, if Email search was reliable.
| fogzen wrote:
| Same. Both my personal and work inbox are currently empty. I
| think it's easier than ever now that spam filters are so good.
|
| I don't have notifications enabled. I triage the inbox 1-3
| times a day, outside of checking for an expected email. Triage
| means responding then archiving, deleting, or snoozing. It's
| pretty easy so I'm always baffled by people who have thousands
| of emails in their inbox. I get the feeling they just don't
| take action or don't receive any real communication.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I will say that I do have thousands in my personal email...
| only in that I had it for close to a decade before I started
| deleting just about all new emails, if there weren't a few
| important emails that I hadn't archived outside email
| (license keys, etc) that I should, but maybe don't have
| outside email, I'd probably nuke it all.
|
| For work, I'm pretty close to inbox zero... I'll mark unread
| if I need to followup and cannot at that moment, or if it's
| related to a yet-uncomplete task I'm waiting on from someone
| else. But at least once a week it's all empty.
|
| I also tend to only check a couple times a day, and my
| personal email a couple times a week... similar no
| notifications. If it's important it will be IM, Text, or
| heaven forbid an actual voice phone call.
| parpfish wrote:
| Not to mention that their notifications are useless. How do
| they know when new emails arrive?! It's more work if you have
| to constantly go in and monitor instead of waiting for a push
| that says "here are three new messages"
| carlosjobim wrote:
| My grandfather survived a Japanese prisoner of war camp when
| his mates died, simply because he always practiced inbox zero.
| xandrius wrote:
| I follow the mantra "Inbox <20". Inbox 0 is not flexible enough
| and freestyle Inbox is not manageable in the long term.
|
| Together with filters, freely reporting as spam/unsubscribing, my
| Inbox <20 becomes a sort of todo list which I can review and
| handle whenever needed (this include flight/hotel bookings,
| getting back to complex emails, etc.).
| ryandrake wrote:
| My inbox at work is an ever-growing TODO list, only it's one that
| is written by other people. And my "Sent" folder is a list of
| people I need to "chase" to make sure they did what I asked them
| to do. I feel like this can take up as much of your work day as
| you let it: Getting to 10% of the things other people want me to
| do and nagging people who are, themselves, doing 10% of the
| things others are asking them to do.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| See Cory Doctorow's "suspense file" (adapted from GTD's tickler
| file) for addressing follow-ups:
|
| <https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo>
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| For me, the entire inbox is this DBTC folder. I have
| notifications set up on my smartwatch and I triage each email in
| real-time as it comes in. If it's urgent, I act on it. If it is
| important or I want to follow up, then I add it to my (separate)
| to-do list, with a Google tasks voice command. And otherwise I
| just ignore the notification and the email sits there in the
| inbox until I feel like dealing with it. I use the unread status
| and pick things off in occasional focus sessions. Some things
| never get "read", and that's because they don't matter. Zero
| bandit stuff because I know exactly what's in my inbox at any
| given time, at least up to what my analog brain can hold. It fits
| right into the old "I heard a noise. What is it?" routine humans
| used when we were hunter-gatherers.
| purple_basilisk wrote:
| Came here to say this. When I'm really pressed for time, I use
| the custom stars in Gmail to indicate the type of followup
| needed - reply, separate task, etc.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I've realised a few things dealing with time and attention, and
| devised a few strategies with varying degrees of success:
|
| - _Information_ consumes _attention_ (as has been long observed).
|
| - Corollary: _excess_ information demands _fast, cheap, regret-
| free rejection mechanisms._ TFA describes several such
| approaches. The "DBTC" folder is one, but _specifically refusing
| to use other, unmanageable, message queues_ (Twitter, FB, Slack,
| etc.) would be others. If a tool refuses to respect your
| boundaries, reject that tool.
|
| - Time-blocking for low-urgency, but still significant tasks is
| useful. You're shifting from interrupt-driven mode to scheduled
| flow. This also means you can assess how your schedule relates to
| the incoming message flow, and whether or not that flow still
| exceeds your (now far more readily quantifiable) time devoted to
| it.
|
| - There's still the question of how to prioritise items you're
| responding to. I'd suggest a rough triage method of:
|
| 1. Identifying high-priority senders (immediate family, work
| (management, colleagues, business relations), friends/social, and
| pretty much all else.
|
| 2. Randomly selecting from lower-priority queues is a way of
| fairly distributing your attention. If you can't do _everything_
| , sample a handful of items.
|
| 3. Quick "no"s (and learning how to phrase these delicately, if
| necessary) are useful. In some cases you might point the
| correspondent in a more useful direction. There's the physics
| professor's tactic of dealing with crackpot questions by
| directing them to one another, which preserves both attention and
| sanity....
|
| My first exposure to the correspondence-limits problem came in
| one of the SF author Arthur C. Clarke's essay collections
| published in the 1970s or 1980s, in which he wrote of having had
| to resort to the tactic of responding to most of his own
| voluminous postal mail correspondence (and that _international_
| postal mail, for the most part, as he lived in Sri Lanka whilst
| most of his correspondents were elsewhere) with a pre-printed
| post-card with a set of checkboxes which answered most common
| inquiries. He 'd already considered two further options: "Mr.
| Clarke regrets", and silence.
|
| The future was not evenly distributed.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Email is an ignorable communication medium. It has lost relevance
| due to its ubiquity, which led to its overuse, which led to its
| redundancy.
|
| There are a lot of stragglers that haven't realized it's
| redundancy yet, and madly spend a significant percentage of their
| time and effort organizing this pulsating mass of ever-changing
| chaos.
|
| If you keep replying, they'll keep asking.
|
| Cut it down to a quick squizz once a day and get in with the
| actual productive work.
|
| (My experience written as universal. I'm aware there are some
| important emails - but I challenge that there aren't as many as
| you think there are)
|
| Edited to add: you can only work on one thing at a time. It
| should always be the highest priority item. If something comes in
| via email, there's little to no likelihood that it should be
| jumping to the top of the pile (email is not a real-time
| communication platform, and people who think it is should be
| corrected). An email is like the first pangs of hunger: at least
| 24 hours from becoming important.
| tomrod wrote:
| I want to sign up for a service that charges people a penny to
| deliver an email to me -- otherwise the email is undeliverable.
| Even a minor cost to delivery will dramatically reduce spam.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Micropayments are the next big thing after fusion power...
| skrishnamurthi wrote:
| Proof-of-work was originally proposed precisely for email
| (specifically spam), by Dwork and Naor back in 1993!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_work
| klez wrote:
| > I'm aware there are some important emails - but I challenge
| that there aren't as many as you think there are
|
| The problem is not whether _I_ think it 's important. The
| problem is _the customer_ thinking that 's important. Or simply
| that I need to be aware of what they wrote. Or that I need to
| be aware of what another vendor wrote.
|
| I'm not saying this is right, I'm saying it's where I'm
| currently sitting at.
| nradov wrote:
| That is idiotic advice. Email is absolutely not ignorable in
| any real business. We constantly receive important emails from
| customers / partners / vendors. If we ignored them then we
| would fail, and deservedly so. They have to be actioned quickly
| and with careful attention to detail.
| stopandth1nk wrote:
| I have used something similar but for a slightly different
| problem. A long time ago (at the start of my career) I started
| using a folder called "Curious George" where I put all those
| really interesting emails with new ideas, trends, etc. The
| problem is not so much death by a thousand cuts but falling down
| a rabbit hole of some cool idea and losing an hour of focus. I
| collect all those dangerous emails and then go through them
| periodically. The difference is that none of these really require
| a direct response but some of them will result in me starting one
| of those annoying email chains that will steal others time - so
| it is much better to allocate time to read thoughtfully so I am
| only sending along the useful bits.
|
| For those daily thieves of attention (described here) my approach
| is to use my inbox itself rather than a new folder. I leave them
| unread and archive the other garbage. Then I go through the
| unreads at a scheduled time. How well does this work for me? -
| not great. It works well enough but maybe I should try this idea
| instead. The biggest challenge with any of these methods is to
| develop the discipline to actually schedule and keep the time to
| review these things.
| wrs wrote:
| The author said they didn't like Getting Things Done, then they
| almost literally reinvented Getting Things Done! Funny how
| sometimes an idea doesn't click until you re-express it in your
| own words.
| skrishnamurthi wrote:
| Author here. That's not true.
|
| GTD asks you to figure out _now_ the action for each thing,
| think about how long that will take, figure out if it will take
| more than 2 (or N) minutes, and if <= that, do it now. The "do
| it now"s can add up to a lot of time and distraction. DBTC is
| the sorting step but without the "figure out the action" step
| or (most critically) the "do it now" step. And there's no
| reflection step, either.
|
| So it's not "literally reinvented", not even "almost".
| tracker1 wrote:
| I tend to try to approach inbox zero... that said, I will mark
| stuff left to be done as unread, and tend to get through most
| things within a few days... at least once a week I will hit 0
| messages in my mailbox. I will sometimes move stuff to different
| docs/archives folders in email for later retrieval, but this is
| separate from a need to respond to now.
| elieskilled wrote:
| Love it. One of the major challenges with email is that a lot of
| disparate content is mixed together.
|
| I run a product called Inbox Zero (if you google the term we're
| the ones that come up first). I often suggest to users that they
| aim for "Reply Zero". They might get 100 emails per day, but only
| 5 need a reply. As long as those are handled they're probably
| good.
|
| One of the challenges people face is that there's so much noise
| mixed together. Newsletter, conversations, receipts,... what you
| call "DBTC", and it's time consuming to sort it into buckets. And
| frankly, before AI it might not have been worth the effort. But
| with AI assistance, it's actually very doable. Inbox Zero offers
| it, as do a bunch of others. What you call DBTC could potentially
| be sorted for you into that folder automatically.
|
| PS. not trying to shill our own product. It's open source so you
| can even self-host it without paying us anything.
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