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I remember when the first cases were reported in New York. I looked up the infection and death rates from the virus, plugged them into a spreadsheet, dragged the calculation down for 2 months, and then immediately texted my girlfriend to suggest that she buy a few weeks of groceries as soon as she could. About 5 days later, everyone else joined me in feeling like this. There were hour-long lines at Trader Joes, and the local convenience stores were completely out of everything. It’s hard to emphasize how quickly everything shut down and sold out. News articles from the morning were hilariously out-of-date by the afternoon. Companies were revising and re-revising their policies on a daily basis. I know workplaces that went from “we’re open hell-or-high-water” to “we’re shut down for the remainder of the year” in the span of a few days. I’ve heard of several workplaces that took the following approach:
Monday: “We’re working from the office.”
Tuesday: “You can work from home if you want.”
Wednesday: “We’re going to work from home for the rest of the week.”
Thursday: “Please work from home tomorrow so that we may deep-clean of the office.”
Friday: “We’re shut down indefinitely.”
I left my job at Etsy. See the Career section for the story. This had a noticeably positive impact on my health. I’ve slept more every night. I take long walks during the day. My step count is up on average. I take the time to cook healthier lunches. I’ve been exercising more, and I was already running 3 or 4 times a week.
So what happened? For about a year and a half, I worked on adding GraphQL as an internal API layer within Etsy. I’m proud of the work that I did. I was given an incredible amount of latitude to design and build the support for it. It’s some of the best engineering that I’ve ever done. Adding an entire API layer to a medium-sized company is hard, but we successfully launched, got some people using it, got some wins, and were growing it. Yet there were serious staffing challenges on the project. At the beginning of 2020, we were 2 engineers and were promised 2 more would be added. The 2 promised headcount vanished at the beginning of the pandemic, and the other engineer was unable to work for vast swaths of the year. Consequently, I worked alone for most of the year. It was too much for me. Working on a growing an API layer and working by myself was burning me out. Taking a 6 week break and working on another team didn’t shake this feeling for me. Problems like this are difficult to fix. Hiring takes months. Onboarding and ramping up takes months. So this was a problem that would take roughly 6 months to fix.
My girlfriend moved in as NYC shut down. She’s still here. It was challenging at first – we went from “we get dinner once during the week and spend the weekends together” to “we are in the same space 24 hours per day indefinitely” It was a lot. But we’ve made it work. A few things helped this: routines, clear expectations, making sure we were meeting each other’s needs, and having a good apartment layout. Having three rooms that block sight lines has really helped. It’s been nice cooking with someone every night.
Besides that, I’ve experimented with video chats with varying degrees of success. My college friends and I have a video game night every Friday, and this has been crucial for helping me feel the passage of time. March feels like it was yesterday, but if I frame it in terms of “how many video game nights has it been?”, I can at least feel some distance.
I used HEY for a week, but I’m going back to Gmail
I got a launch invite and decided to try it for a week.
I forwarded my personal Gmail into my hey.com account for one week. I got ~120 emails from ~80 senders. I only sent a handful of emails. This matches my personal email load for a typical week.
Thanks to coronavirus, I had two modes this week: feeling unsafe outside and testing HEY inside. I wore my mask for both.
I interacted with the Screener a lot. I received email from ~80 different senders this week. I screened five of them out.
I spent lots of time considering some of the Screener decisions. I used to have a Netlify project that I have since deleted. I don’t need to receive email from them now. Maybe I should say “no” to a promotional email that they sent me. But what if I want to use Netlify in the future? I liked Netlify. I might use it again. Would my “no” still apply? I would be missing email that I need to receive. What if I lose my job in the recession and Netlify contacted me about a job opportunity? Would it be screened out? I had this kind of debate repeatedly throughout the week. Who is a sender? Is it a single email address? Is it a company? Is it an individual who could be represented by multiple email addresses? What about catch-all addresses like noreply? When can I safely reject email? I only felt safe using the Screener in a few narrow cases. In cases like Netlify, I screened them in and unsubscribed from the mailing list.
I’d like to make two caveats to this section. First: it seems that Gmail does not forward spam to HEY. I don’t know how good HEY’s spam filtering is and I don’t know how important the Screener would be in relation to it. Second: I only used HEY for a week. The Screener was a constant presence in the beginning. It appeared less as the week went on. I imagine that it wouldn’t appear much next week.
After using the categorization for a week, it was clear that I struggled with both of them. I receive a daily newsletter with lengthy emails ( Money Stuff by Matt Levine). It’s too big to read all at once during my workday. In practice, I sneak 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there. When it’s in The Feed, this means that it was not an email. Instead it’s a card that is slowly being pushed down by other things in The Feed. The later in the day I started reading it, the harder it becomes to complete it 5 minutes at a time. Maybe I’d move this specific newsletter out of The Feed. There’s not much left at this point. I’d have to keep polling to find when the two or three remaining things ended up in The Feed. Everything might as well be in the Imbox.
I fought against this workflow all week. HEY does a good job of explaining its categorization system. But I struggled to live in it. I really just wanted everything to appear in the Imbox. This is the same reason that I stopped using the “Multiple Inbox” feature in Gmail: I’d rather stop unwanted emails at their source, instead of moving it into a separate low-frequency box.
I wish that Hey’s tutorial was more spread out and depth-first. I spent most of my week screening emails. I did that more than anything else. So I wish that it focused heavily on the Screener in the beginning, and then introduced the Feed and Paper Trail when I moved emails into it. Later, it could describe the more advanced features as emails enter your Imbox. I understand the pressure to differentiate yourself and prove that you’re worth $100 early in the user’s journey. But the education process didn’t feel good to experience.
I’m going to tell you a horror story. Remember the above example: adding a UI feature to a web app? I’m going to work on that change. And I’m going to do the whole thing in a single pull request. I swoop my cape over my face and disappear into my evil lair for over a week.