daverea.com

It seems like certain tools in our lives have a tendency to morph into lifestyles, obsessions, or even whip-wielding captors (complete with Stockholm Syndrome) over time. I can think of few better-suited examples of this than E-Mail… Most of us have an almost Pavlovian reaction to incoming e-mail when we’re at work, and thanks to smartphones, Blackberries and webmail portals, we can make our e-mail obsession immediate and ubiquitous in ways unimaginable just a few years ago.

Sometime in 2007, my thoroughly-digitized friend Pauley introduced me to “Inbox Zero” as I played with his shiny new iPhone. Curious why his e-mail inbox was conspicuously empty, he explained that Inbox Zero is a practice he follows that was dreamed up by Merlin Mann, an Internet guru who rolls with the who’s-who of the web’s cutting edge. The philosophy – and it’s definitely a philosophy – is that our time is too precious and scarce to waste letting e-mail (which, let’s remember, is a tool) dictate how we work. After letting the concept stew at “interesting” status for a while, I started using Inbox Zero at my day job in 2008. Minutes after I processed through my inbox for the first time, colleagues started asking me about my curious new practice. After a day or two, I stopped dreading opening Lotus Notes (well, except for the fact that it was Lotus Notes). And after a week, I noticed that the time I was spending on e-mail had dramatically dropped. Like, by a factor of ten.

Since then, I’ve tried my best to keep using Inbox Zero. I’ve been better at it some times than others, but in using it, I’ve noticed a hole of-sorts in the practice of Inbox Zero. The philosophy advises that we must change the way we view e-mail in order to constrain our interaction with it to manageable chunks of time. The practice, on the other hand, suggests that we should fit that interaction into “passes” or “dashes”, which we use to methodically process through our messages and address them. Therein, at least in my experience, lies the problem.

I think one of the reasons people are easily trapped into pouring time into e-mail is that it’s often the “glue” that binds their other activities. When you arrive at the office, you check your e-mail and find something actionable. You go off (either physically or mentally) and do whatever it is the e-mail demands, then return to respond or file it away. The turnaround time might be seconds, minutes or hours, but in every case you find yourself back in your inbox. When we process to zero as Merlin advises, we partially short-circuit this process by filing actionable messages into a spot that’s more worthy of our time and attention. But the problem remains: some e-mails just take a long time to address.

For me – and that’s a huge caveat – what’s lacking is a way to separate the e-mails from the actions they prompt. In my world, an e-mail can just as easily trigger a 30-second response as it can trigger a two-hour excursion into analyzing a customer’s design. In both cases, the e-mail is actionable and needs answering. But in one case, I can handle it right within my e-mail dash, while in the other I’m performing a significant (and often billable) task in order to generate a response. My answer? I think this is where having a solid means of managing tasks and projects comes in. For our professional projects, my partners and I use Basecamp to manage tasks – so when I encounter an e-mail that results in a slug of work to do, I try to distill the message into the actions it’s prompting, then capture them in Basecamp. I can then file the e-mail away for a response once the work’s done, keep my inbox at zero, and respect my existing means of selecting what to do when.

That practice needs to feed back into Inbox Zero’s philosophy: e-mail shouldn’t short-circuit your existing ways of managing your tasks and getting things done. Just because it makes a nice dinging sound doesn’t mean it gets elevated to the highest priority. Yes, Merlin does touch on this, but it’s really in the context of “the before” with respect to using Inbox Zero. E-mail in proper perspective is a must – but re-training yourself to funnel e-mail’s “actionables” into your regular workstream is just as important. Of course, this assumes you have a regular workstream apart from e-mail firefighting and task management by-heroics…and if you don’t, I can’t think of a better way to start making space for one than with Inbox Zero.

These days, it seems like everybody and their brother is running an app store. What began as closely-controlled walled-gardens of BREW apps for flip phones, curated by mobile carriers charging steep entry fees, grew into Apple’s benchmark term-coiner “app store” and then exploded into a plethora of application delivery platforms. Google’s “Android Market” is hot on Apple’s heels and closing in on a quarter million applications. Commerce heavyweight Amazon has announced their own app marketplace for Android, and several independents (such as AndSpot, AndAppStore and others) have sprung up recently too. Even Microsoft has 5000 apps in their scintillatingly-named “Windows Phone 7 Apps Marketplace”.

Which begs the question – what’s next? I’m going to go out on a limb and make a prediction for 2011: Mobile App Rental. It’s not something you see every day in the desktop application world, but it exists. In the fickle mobile space, however, rental could be a real differentiator. As mobile apps become more tightly-focused on specific tasks, the likelihood that they’re not needed on a continual basis increases. If I’m visiting an unfamiliar city (or country, for that matter), I wouldn’t necessarily drop $1 on an “insider-guide” or offline transit map application for my destination. But if a rental offering was sufficiently differentiated from on- and off-device free alternatives, I’d gladly spend 10¢ to use a copy for a weekend. Another example might be navigation: if I’m headed to a place (say, Canada) where a mobile data connection will cost me extra roaming charges, I’d gladly rent an offline navigation app while I’m there. Once my rental expires, the app store could simply auto-remove that app from my device. Such a model trades off purchase price for volume – people who wouldn’t normally buy your app might be willing to rent it, so you can meet the needs of a larger customer base with less customer risk.

Extending the navigation example, such a model could even be implemented in-app. I use an offline GPS navigation app called CoPilot Live, which normally goes for $10 on the Android Market. My version includes only USA maps – but nothing (except, perhaps, certain app store distribution agreements) stops CoPilot from renting me maps for other countries should I only need them for a brief period. Ordinarily, purchasing the global version would cost me $40 – a cheaper alternative to paying per-diem for a car-rental-agency GPS or overseas data roaming, but still more cash than I’m willing to drop for an app I’ll only use for a few days. But paying $5 to rent that map set for the week? That I would do – it’s a powerful value proposition.

The possibilities really open up when you consider gaming – where extra levels, seasonal themes or bonus features could see greater uptake through a timed rental offering. Then, go one step further – pull GPS location right into the app store, enabling rental apps that expire when I leave the geographic vicinity they target, without ever sharing the user’s location with the app or its developer.

Will my prediction pan out? Who knows – but as developers, manufacturers, OS developers and carriers get more creative with mobile business models, I wouldn’t be surprised to see rentals hitting the streets before too long.

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