“This Amazing Productivty Hack”

Good ol’ clickbait! Here’s how the above headline was presented in my Medium Weekly Digest newsletter:

Want to know what the amazing productivity hack is?

“Send everything to the trash first, then pull out from the trash what’s important.”

Yes, the author literally advocates deleting all your email from the inbox, then going to the trash/deleted items folder and pulling out what you really want to keep.

Or, you know, don’t subscribe to a bunch of crap you never read in the first place? Then there’s no need for any kind of multistep process, because all the junk email you don’t want or need never arrives! That’s my amazing productivity hack.

The author alleges that “By the end of the day, there were more than 50 emails chillaxing in my new digital Zen space. How dare they! And they were nearly early all spam — including stuff I thought I’d unsubscribed from, blocked, or banned.” This sounds rather fishy. First, she uses the huge caveat of “I thought I’d…” which probably means “I never did”, or she has catastrophically bad filtering on her email account. Or both. Also, how do you “ban” email?

Here’s another amazing productivity hack: Don’t waste your time reading stories like this, or even blog posts like this one deconstructing them. Go play with a puppy or kitten instead. Hug a tree. Talk to a plant. East a cookie. Or one of the other billion trillion quadrillion things that would be a better use of your time.

In conclusion, this cat:

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