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Hi ProductHunt -- Five years ago, someone on our team figured out that an extension could make a series of requests in just the right order and pretend to be a user creating a filter in Gmail. We spent a few days hacking and came up with a nifty project - a way to make new email stop coming into your Inbox while you worked (or played). It dramatically reduced the amount of notifications and interruptions stemming from email, and it meant there was an "end" to email for those who kept Inbox Zero. It worked pretty well, except when it didn't. Because the APIs it used were unsupported and undocumented, there were bugs that were impossible for us to fix. And while the feature was interesting and helpful, we didn't know if it was all that valuable. So we kept it in a state of benign neglect, making sure it never stopped working, but not really investing in it. Today, we are giving it the love and attention it deserves. For two big reasons, we're delighted to bring pausing your Inbox into Boomerang as a fully supported feature. First, new research has validated the ideas behind Inbox Pause. We all sort of know that checking email constantly and compulsively is a bad habit. People like Tim Ferriss have been telling us to batch process our email for years. But now there are peer reviewed studies that quantify the benefits. The one mentioned here (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/...), from UBC, is probably the most important one to look at. They found that checking email only a few times a day resulted in about the same amount of stress reduction as adopting a meditation practice. And it came with increased productivity - the participants spent 20% less time on email, without a significant drop in responsiveness. So using Inbox Pause every day should be as effective as apps like Headspace or Calm at reducing stress, but instead of taking up 2 hours a week, it actually gives you 2 extra hours to spend on something meaningful. Second, both Gmail and Outlook have now released APIs that expose all the functionality we need to build Inbox Pause the right way. The Gmail Settings API released late last year, and we're the first Outlook add-in to take advantage of the new Rules API, which came out about a month ago. With these new APIs replacing the hacks we had before, we can make these features work reliable and robust. If you're on Gmail or Outlook, I hope you'll give it a try and let me know how it works for you! If you have any questions about the features or the research behind it or the APIs we use, let me know. I and other folks from our team will be around to answer any questions.
@ayemoah Love it! I will give it a try for sure. :) Be sure to check out our tool , it will be very interesting to you. https://www.producthunt.com/upco...
One of the things I lovelovelove about the Boomerang folks is that they are laser-focused on the "why" when they build stuff. Because they feel so strongly about making sure that users feel in control over their inboxes, they do all the little polish details to make it work just right. For example, I'm already pretty good at batching my emails, but Inbox Pause makes that process even better because of all the options to make sure that I can configrue Inbox Pause to match the workflow that mimics the way that I think. Kudos to Moah and everyone else at Boomerang!
Oh God. Moah. You guys know how much I love what you do, but this might be the best thing you've ever released.
@bradmccarty Thanks, Brad! That's very kind. Hope it will make your day more zen and save you more time than before.
Been using Boomerang for Gmail for years now...and it just keeps getting better!
How does this compare to what Inbox does with bundling? I know I get some of my emails in batches through Inbox
@mgrisoli Yep, Inbox has a really cool take on this concept too. In Inbox, you can set bundles to be delivered to your Inbox at certain times of the day. This lets you do some timed arrival also, as well as providing a full "just pause my email" mode for stopping all of the interruptions. The advantages of this version: * You get more flexibility around when your Inbox is paused and, when you want it to stop, etc. If you just want to stop all email for two hours while you write an important proposal, you can. * You specify which messages come through immediately and which get held up, rather than an algorithm that in practice lets a lot of low-value messages through * You can use it in Gmail (but not in Inbox) The bundle version has some advantages too: * You can use it in Inbox (but not in Gmail) * You can set up only promotions, or only social network notifications to get batched, which is a good workflow in its own right * They don't monetize their version