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by josefresco 2788 days ago
My guess? The point is basically to create an aid to break your addiction. Why don't people just stop smoking? Why don't you just decide not to pull out your phone? Why don't you just put down that donut? Sometimes, we need an extra shove or hurdle to break bad habits.
2 comments

Thanks for jumping in josefresco. Exactly.

Two big reasons we built it: 1. the discipline to only check emails X times a day is unfortunately not one that comes naturally to us, and 2. a large part of our job is replying to and dealing with emails, so we still wanted to be able to be in our inbox (to find the relevant information for a current task), but don't want new emails jumping up and interrupting our flow.

So nice, that feeling, when you get through your batch of emails, and knowing you now have 4-5 hours of un(email) interrupted focus time.

So this is the (choose one) not-free-in-the-future/temporary third-party-server-side equivalent of telling Mail.app/Exchange/Thunderbird to check for new mail every few hours instead of every minute. But those configurations are free and forever without any "we reserve the right to change the terms at any time" bogus ToS. Is that about right?
Some of the advantages vs using your Mail app to do this are:

1. it works across all your devices (as works at the gmail server level)

2. you can set exceptions (e.g. email from mygirlfriend@gmail.com should always arrive immediately)

Took us 10 days to build, and costs us nothing to run. No intention to monetize (we run a BI platform called trevor.io which pays our salaries. Feel free to check it out if you want to support us :) ).

TIL, people can get addicted to email. It's actually pretty interesting, I didn't know that was a thing.