Your email needs Tempo

Minimalist, focused email client lets you reclaim time & be productive

Imagine calming grey and white tones in full screen. On the left is an email that you received presented visually as if it was written on actual paper. And on the right is an empty compose area waiting for you to type away your reply. There is a scarcity of buttons, and the few that’s on screen fade away when you start typing. Everything is focused on that email in front of you and how you want to respond to it.

And it is pure delight.

This week, everyone’s been talking about the new Hey email service from Basecamp, but a small team in Copenhagen had already fixed most of email’s issues without the need for changing your email address.

Please meet Tempo, which I’ve been using for two weeks now, and despite a few things that are currently lacking (more on that below), I can’t imagine going back to the cluttered experiences of Gmail, Spark and others that induce so much anxiety and a false sense of achievement.

Email is a means to an end, not the end itself.

Managing email these days feels like the core of our work, especially for those of us in the tech sector where our services are digital by nature. The average person checks their email 15 times a day, equivalent to every 37 minutes, and this habit has become a procrastination tool disguised as productivity, costing us one hour and 21 minutes every day.

Think of yourself. You likely have your email client open at all times receiving messages throughout the day with notifications turned on. Every notification you receive disrupts your deep work time on client or internal projects (aka real work), causing your mind to lose focus.

Tempo has built in 3 workflows that help you tame your inbox and reclaim time for actual work.

1. Batching ⏰

Instead of continuously checking for new email and alerting the user for each, Tempo will only check for new emails at preset times and alert you then. By default, it does two batches — once in the morning and a second one in the afternoon, but it allows the user to edit and add more batch times. So, if you’d like to add a lunchtime batch, be our guest. My setup has four batch times throughout the day.

It also has built in prioritisation and will not alert you to new emails at these batch times unless you have any priority emails. Priority is defined as emails determined to be coming from another person rather than a newsletter or notification. So if the new stuff you received at your next batch time are only newsletters and promotions, Tempo won’t bother you.

2. Sorting 🧐

When a new batch of emails has arrived, Tempo takes you to the sorting process. In this full-screen view, you read your new messages and decide if you want to:

• Quick reply: Tempo gives you 140 characters to respond asap. This allows you to essentially type your response and be done with it while sorting. Things like lunch invites, confirming a meeting, etc. that shouldn’t need a prioritisation.
• Archive: Most of your email will likely go here. You read, you note, you archive and it’s done and dusted.
• Snooze: You have to respond to these emails but not today, so you snooze them to tackle at a later date. Tempo will revive this email in your Workspace on your selected date.
• Select as a to-do: This email requires some thought and drafting so you mark it as a to-do to include this email in your Workspace today.

This is similar to the Eisenhower matrix, where you prioritise tasks by urgency and importance. This dedicated sorting time allows you to mentally organise everything and gauge your workload. It did force me to make decisions, whereas other email clients reward your inability to decide by letting you just keep everything all the time.

Once sorting ends, Tempo takes you to your Workspace where your to-do’s are waiting for you.

3. Focusing 🤓

When you’re ready to tackle your to-do’s in your Workspace, you can launch the Focus mode, which then displays your to-do emails one at a time on the left and gives you a beautiful, blank compose area on the right to properly respond.

And this is where Tempo shines brightest. How many times have you had the need to scroll through the message you’re responding to while composing? Well, Tempo makes this a breeze by providing dedicated space to the email you’re replying to and your composition in their separate areas. No more minimising or changing windows.

You also don’t see anything else in the background that might distract you from the task at hand, unlike Gmail or Spark where you see plenty of other messages in the background all vying for your attention.

I found that Focus mode allowed me to get through my email to-do list much faster and with better, more thought-out responses.

Room for Improvement

As you can tell, I’m a fan of Tempo, and I will happily pay for the service when it goes subscription only — it’s currently free while in beta.

But there are a few holes that keep it from being the perfect client.

• Email composition is handled in markdown, which is not ideal. It requires knowing keyboard shortcuts and does not allow for image embedding in the email body, so I think this might put off mainstream users.
• There is no mobile app at present, but I know the team is working on one that still adheres to the company’s mission of helping you focus. As you can imagine, mobile, instant notifications are the antithesis of focus so they’re carefully thinking through what their version of a mobile email experience should amount to. I can’t wait.
• I really REALLY wish there was a dark mode at night. All the whites and greys can get a bit bright at night.

I thought Mailbox was revolutionary with its snooze function and “inbox zero” creed when it came out in 2013. Then, I thought Inbox by Gmail got really close to a focused email experience with its pinning feature and no-fuss design in 2014. Sadly, none of these services are alive today, so our options are bulky, confusing email clients like Gmail, Spark, Outlook, etc.

Tempo really takes a unique stance amongst this crowd and offers a kind of experience that marries utilitarianism with pleasure.

Well done. 👏