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>Hell, by the time you've switched context, you might as well read the article: your concentration is shot. Ten seconds of scanning an email header might take five or ten minutes to recover from.

I read email only once or twice a day and have turned off all email notifications, which eliminates this objection to email.

Footnote: "turned off all email notifications": exception: I set procmail to play some music whenever my machine gets an email from my girlfriend, but that is a temporary measure designed to condition her and reward her (with prompt responses) for emailing instead of calling.



Oh man - I'd love to see how she'd react to the knowledge that she is being conditioned.


He's the one who is responding to her promptly. Methinks he's the one being conditioned.


No, he's already conditioned himself to answer certain "high-priority" emails quickly while responding with high latency to voicemails.

His girlfriend who will be more likely to change her behaviour in response to this exercise, rather than him (i.e. he's already conditioned himself).


I'd love to see what your procmail setup is like.


Easy enough for me to show you. The relevant recipe is as follows. The c means make a copy of the message, i.e., keep going even if the rule is a hit. The h means save or pipe only the headers. /usr/bin/afplay is specific to OS X.

  :0
  *^from:.*persephone
  {
      :0 c:
      $DEFAULT

      :0 h
      | /usr/bin/afplay --time 6.2 /o/music/live_at_leeds_2/16_miracle_cure.mp3
  }




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