What if I told you this could reduce the time you spend on email by 50%?
How Cubeit makes your email more usable.
It’s a nice Friday evening, and you’ve just stepped out of the office. It’s been a tough week, and you’re looking forward to a 48 hour break without work, and with a lot of beer — all the ingredients of a successful weekend.
10 minutes in, there’s a familiar buzzing in your pocket. You ignore it, hoping that it goes away. Whatever’s ringing your phone has other plans though, and the buzzing keeps increasing in intensity till you give up, and well into your third beer, give up and check whats happening.
“Sorry to catch you on a Friday evening, Jimmy.”
It’s your boss, and the very first line of the email tells you all you need to know.The weekend is dead, and you need to sober up fast.
It turns out that the insistent buzzing in your pocket was important, and by the time you’ve picked up your phone, things have gotten slightly out of hand.
You are now staring at a 30 message email chain started by your boss. There is something he needs done within the next hour.
As you struggle to read through lines of text filled with tasks, deadlines, links, attachments, contacts, and more, the sinking feeling in your stomach gets worse. How are you humanly supposed to make sense of so much information in so little time?
You come to the conclusion that there’s no way you can quickly read everything in the email and make an informed decision on what to do next, simply because there’s JUST TOO MUCH to digest.
Sigh.
You switch off your phone, and head back to your beer. Time to start thinking of ways to blame your cat for the whole episode.
What’s the problem with email?
Let’s not kid ourselves — Email is a problem. Think back to the amount of time you spend on email everyday, and how you cringe everytime you open your overflowing inbox.
But why does everyone love to hate email? Let’s try and break it down.
The problem with email is that it is too easy to use.
Too Many Emails
This one is really out of your hands. You have minimal control over the emails which arrive in your inbox — whether they are written to you, you’re in cc, or from that website you thought would send you useful information. The best way to address this problem is get through your email fast, but how do you do that when all emails have too much information you don’t want?
Too Much Useless Information
Email is by nature unstructured (which is part of the reason why it’s so popular.) You can put absolutely any type of content in it and it gives unreasonable power to the creator of the email. You decide whether your email will be short, full of nice bullet points, which make it easy for people to understand what you are saying, OR whether it’s going to be long, complicated, and really tough to make any sense out of. Let’s face it, most people are terrible writers and by extension, they will be terrible at writing an email — another reason why you’re spending most of your time on email being unproductive. In a badly written email, it’s tough to find the actionable information, because it is almost always buried under tons of unimportant text.
This means you spend a lot of time reading fluff rather than cutting through the noise and being halfway through the project that will earn you your promotion. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve looked back after reaching the end of a long email thread and asked myself — “So now what am I supposed to do?”
Now that we’ve articulated some problems with the way we deal with email today, and before we start sounding like another app which prophesies the death of email, let me cut ahead and tell you something.
We aren’t going to kill email.
(Sorry if we broke some hearts there.)
Yes email has its share of problems, but it still is a wonderful tool with a lot of power and simplicity, so why would we want to kill it? Especially when the problem is not email itself, it’s the way we are using it.
The solution lies in being able to utilize the information coming to you via email in a fast an efficient way — i.e making email actionable.
How does Cubeit help me in making my email actionable?
The image below tells you how.
Cubeit takes all the structured elements out of an email conversation and converts them into simple, actionable cards.
Links are extracted and given a title and a source, and opened in a viewer within the app.
Attachments are easily accessible as cards instead of being buried within individual emails.
Dates and times are converted into event cards, which you can add into your calendar.
Phone numbers and emails shared in the email are converted into standard, actionable contact cards.
Imagine being able to scan a long email chain, and being able to focus and act on the things that matter — Links, Deadlines, Contacts, Attachments, and more.
So here’s what we’ll do now.
- If you like what Cubeit can do with your email, all you need to do is recommend this post. (It would mean a lot, especially in terms of telling us that what we are building is actually going to be useful to you.)
- If you don’t (which is entirely possible, we’re not Jedi Masters), then comment and tell us, and we will listen. (I don’t want to make the joke about your ex again, and I can’t think of anything else. Sheesh.)
Over to you guys.
