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peterhartree | 4 years ago | on: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

Yes, it collects your email when you install. This lets me send a couple onboarding messages and determine what plan you are on. There's more info in the (human readable) privacy policy.

When I started this project I wanted the onboarding experience to be as simple as possible, i.e. no annoying sign up stage. I wondered whether this approach would lead to lots of questions like yours: in fact, I think less than 5 people have asked about this since 2015. My sense is that, on balance, most people benefit from the "install = sign-up" flow.

https://inboxwhenready.org/terms-privacy/

peterhartree | 4 years ago | on: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

> Fixing the hive-mind is going to be a billion dollar industry

Cal Newport was one of the inspirations for https://inboxwhenready.org. At this point, people have paid me over $100K to make it harder for them to read their email.

I've made some effort to persuade the Gmail and Superhuman teams to take this issue seriously, but to no avail, yet. If anyone here is building an email client or popular Gmail extension, I'm happy to talk about this stuff whenever.

peterhartree | 8 years ago | on: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

In 2015, the European Commission published a report which included the following [1]:

> We believe that societies must protect, cherish and nurture humans’ attentional capabilities. This does not mean giving up searching for improvements: that shall always be useful. Rather, we assert that attentional capabilities are a finite, precious and rare asset. In the digital economy, attention is approached as a commodity to be exchanged on the market place, or to be channelled in work processes. But this instrumental approach to attention neglects the social and political dimensions of it, i.e., the fact that the ability and the right to focus our own attention is a critical and necessary condition for autonomy, responsibility, reflexivity, plurality, engaged presence, and a sense of meaning. To the same extent that organs should not be exchanged on the market place, our attentional capabilities deserve protective treatment. Respect for attention should be linked to fundamental rights such as privacy and bodily integrity, as attentional capability is an inherent element of the relational self for the role it plays in the development of language, empathy, and collaboration. We believe that, in addition to offering informed choices, the default settings and other designed aspects of our technologies should respect and protect attentional capabilities.

(The report was co-authored by Luciano Floridi, who is supervising James Williams' PhD at Oxford.)

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/sites/digital-age...

peterhartree | 8 years ago | on: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

> If this is true Then it also presents a unique opportunity. I.e. There should be a very real and observable productivity boost from being able to ignore

B J Fogg, who gets brief mention in this article, teaches his students to cause behaviour by making the behaviour easy and then delivering timely triggers [1]. If you find yourself behaving in ways you don't reflectively endorse, your basic approach should be to flip the Fogg model upside down – avoid triggers and make it harder.

In my own case, that's meant disabling notifications and blocking websites and apps. I also hacked a Chrome extension which applies the "avoid triggers and make it harder" idea to Gmail [2]. The extension has several thousand users, many of whom reclaim 30-60 minutes of focussed work each week which would otherwise be lost to compulsive inbox processing.

[1] http://www.behaviormodel.org/

[2] https://inboxwhenready.org

peterhartree | 8 years ago | on: The “free” economy comes at a cost

> Correct a problem? A problem for who? Neither the consumer nor the provider appear to be in any kind of trouble.

In a recent lecture at the RSA [1], James Williams (former Googler who worked on metrics and strategy for search advertising) makes the case that:

- The ‘distractions’ produced by digital technologies are much more profound than minor ‘annoyances’

- So-called ‘persuasive’ design is undermining the human will and ‘militating against the possibility of all forms of self-determination’

- Beginning to ‘assert and defend our freedom of attention’ is an urgent moral and political task

I'd recommend giving it a listen. Tristan Harris' recent TED talk offers a more popular primer [2].

[1] https://soundcloud.com/the_rsa/are-digital-technologies-maki...

[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tr...

peterhartree | 8 years ago | on: Our Minds Have Been Hijacked by Our Phones

From the transcript of the TED talk [1] mentioned in the OP:

> So how do we fix this? We need to make three radical changes to technology and to our society.

> The first is we need to acknowledge that we are persuadable. Once you start understanding that your mind can be scheduled into having little thoughts or little blocks of time that you didn't choose, wouldn't we want to use that understanding and protect against the way that that happens? I think we need to see ourselves fundamentally in a new way. It's almost like a new period of human history, like the Enlightenment, but almost a kind of self-aware Enlightenment, that we can be persuaded, and there might be something we want to protect.

> The second is we need new models and accountability systems so that as the world gets better and more and more persuasive over time -- because it's only going to get more persuasive -- that the people in those control rooms are accountable and transparent to what we want. The only form of ethical persuasion that exists is when the goals of the persuader are aligned with the goals of the persuadee. And that involves questioning big things, like the business model of advertising.

> Lastly, we need a design renaissance, because once you have this view of human nature, that you can steer the timelines of a billion people -- just imagine, there's people who have some desire about what they want to do and what they want to be thinking and what they want to be feeling and how they want to be informed, and we're all just tugged into these other directions. And you have a billion people just tugged into all these different directions. Well, imagine an entire design renaissance that tried to orchestrate the exact and most empowering time-well-spent way for those timelines to happen. And that would involve two things: one would be protecting against the timelines that we don't want to be experiencing, the thoughts that we wouldn't want to be happening, so that when that ding happens, not having the ding that sends us away; and the second would be empowering us to live out the timeline that we want.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tr...

peterhartree | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?

Here's what I did for my Chrome extension [1]:

1. Searched the Chrome Web Store, Twitter and Google for users who had said lukewarm or negative things about another extension which addresses a similar user problem in a different way.

2. Searched the same places for people who were clearly interested in the topic of focus and email productivity.

I spent a day or so manually emailing several hundred people in this way. This initial push - and the events that it lead to (e.g. people I contacted recommending the extension to others) - got me 100 WAU within a couple of weeks (and lots of helpful feedback).

(I tried some other things which were much less effective. Listing sites, in particular, were largely a waste of time, though my Product Hunt submission came good when the extension was featured a few months later.)

[1] https://inboxwhenready.org

peterhartree | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: I’ve been applying to a million jobs

> I can't take this situation anymore and this is a cry from the heart.

> I am so frustrated right now, I don't understand why everything takes so long, this process is unbearable.

Meta advice: if I were you, I'd take a break for a few days and focus on getting your feelings about this back to a calmer, constructive, cheerful place.

If you're not sure how to do this, I'd say: start with vigorous exercise every day [1], do things you normally enjoy, and consider mindfulness meditation [2].

[1] http://7-min.com/ is a good quick fix.

[2] https://www.headspace.com/ is good and free for a beginner.

peterhartree | 9 years ago | on: The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build

> for many websites you'll get more accurate traffic data with GoAccess parsing your logs and showing you page views and basic demographic data

Yes but remember that bot traffic may be more of an issue when analysing server side logs (a lot of bots still don't execute JavaScript).

It's hard to know how effective the bot filtering features in GoAccess are compared with those of Google Analytics.

peterhartree | 9 years ago | on: Four of Iceland’s main volcanoes are preparing for eruption

When there are ongoing eruptions in Iceland, there are usually several companies that offer flights or helicopter tours to go see them. The tours normally cost $1-2k per person. Another option is to go hang out at the domestic airport in Reykjavík. Talk to a few people and you may find a private pilot who just wants to split the fuel cost.

peterhartree | 9 years ago | on: Four of Iceland’s main volcanoes are preparing for eruption

> Isn't it dangerous to fly over erupting volcanos?

I'm not a pilot, but I trusted the judgement of the pilot and felt like it was worth the risk. The pilot planned our approaches carefully and though we got quite low, we were always circling around rather than going directly over the fissure. At the time the Icelandic aviation authorities had issued a warning (but no closure) for the airspace around the volcano.

The spectacle was so moving that fear wasn't a prominent emotion. The only hair-raising part was when we flew too low over some lava (shortly after this photograph was taken: https://www.flickr.com/photos/41812768@N07/15145875322/in/al...). The turbulent air from the heat shook the aircraft so violently that my headset came off.

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