The joy of a fresh email account

Increasingly, over the past few months, my personal email — a Gmail account — I’ve had since the beginning is almost useless due to spam. Combined with my lingering issues over the Gmail UI, I reconsidered and got myself a Hey.com account. It still has the new email account smell.

Here are some of the joys I’m rediscovering with a fresh email account:

It’s for personal email only

Over the years, my Gmail and willkelly.com emails became intermingled, mostly when I was a freelance writer. Since day 1, I use my Hey.com for only personal email. It’s not for pitches. It’s not for my opensource.com contributions either.

I can track important personal email

Recently, I used my Hey.com email to sign my Mom up for her Covid vaccination. Using a clean email account gave me confidence that these most important emails wouldn’t get lost in the spam repository that my personal Gmail account has become.

Hey.com does break new ground in email

I went back and forth over whether to purchase a Hey.com email account. The email experience has long been ruined for me because of spam. While I didn’t quite get the filtering features during my Hey.com trial, I’ve come to appreciate them after seeing them in action.
Hey.com does restrict you to their email client, which feels like a step backward somehow. The bright spot is that the Hey.com user interface is relatively novel, with many of the same design sensibilities I enjoy using Basecamp.

My COVID-19 Tech Stack: It’s all about Communications and Collaboration

During the pandemic, I’ve been fine-tuning my personal technology stack the whole time. My personal attitude about apps is that the application work for me, I don’t work for the application. So while I’m the first person to experiment with a new application, it needs to be easy to use.

Here’s how my current pandemic tech stack looks:

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10 things I do when I can’t sleep: Pandemic edition

The last eleven months of the pandemic have played havoc with my sleep. It’s typical for me to wake up at some point during the night and then roll over and go back to sleep. In pandemic times, there are times I wake up wired, and just know I won’t be falling back to sleep. Here are some things I do when I can’t sleep:

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My search for peak productivity in a pandemic

Rolling past nine months of working at home during a pandemic has been a lesson in maintaining productivity for me. For years, I would pride myself on being able to spend the day writing, head to the gym, then come home and write some more until it was time to sleep. Rinse. Repeat. 

The pandemic changed all that for me (and lots of others too). Here are some things I do to maintain my productivity during this time:

Continue reading “My search for peak productivity in a pandemic” →