232 - email audit 🚨📩
Hey there, !
I got this idea from a friend of mine, Cuong, because we were sharing our email habits. I thought it would be interesting to do a bit of an email audit and try to answer why I have 4,253 unread emails on my personal Gmail account:
Look, what we should be looking at first here is the Promotions tab - where Google has saved me from 36k emails!! I don't see them in my inbox at all - they're all emails that are like 'hey did you know you can by a holiday from Luxury Escapes' and 'hey you should definitely buy more food from UberEats since we haven't seen you in months!'. AWAY WITH YE, DEVILS.
Let's jump in.
Note - all of these screenshots have been taken on the 31st of March, and represent the first 50 or so emails in my inbox. I think it's a relatively representative sample (it doesn't have bills or anything that is sent on a monthly cadence that I haven't looked at yet), so do with that information what you will.
Let's go through a few things here:
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I send myself a PREVIEW version of every newsletter post before I send them out to you as my own form of editing - putting it in a new format so I can see what it would look like from an outside point of view.
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In what will be a common refrain in the rest of this post - most of these unread posts are newsletters that I've signed up for that I haven't had time to scroll and read through yet. I really want to, and I had so much hope when they started...and I still have hope that I'll get through them (some day)...
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Marie Dolle does a REALLY GOOD newsletter about the future of social media - it's actually where I first heard of BeReal as a new social media platform that French teenagers were using. It's really insightful!
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The Marginalian is the source of a lot of really nice poetry and letters from interesting thinkers, writers and poets from the past. She is really good at cross-linking her previous posts, which means once you get into one of them, you'll just be on a rabbit hole of reading more and more and more.
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Techcrunch and newsletter (which is actually an AI Art weekly newsletter) are ones I should probably unsubscribe from - they were intersting as tech news, but I don't really read them as much these days
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Collaborative Fund is where I read a lot of Morgan Housel posts, and I've linked their posts a lot in the past. Lots of good short posts from this hedge fund that finds different ways to think about the world.
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Johnn Four is a DND-related newsletter - an experienced DM sending tips and tricks every week to other DM's.
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EJ - History Investor is another older newsletter that I honestly don't remember why I signed up. It used to be called 'But What For' and I think it has evolved since then - I think it was some really well written posts that I enjoyed (I probably linked it here previously), and I've just kept around :D
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Kickstarter is one that I'll read every time, mainly because I want to get updates on the projects that I've helped crowd fund. Peter Chiykowski is someone from previous projects who sends emails on a different mailing list, so I usually read it because it might have something useful!
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Here, we see a few more that are about the stocks I hold! It's the half year interim dividend period, so a bunch of places are posting their results and dividends. I like that it just gives me a li'l bit here and there for my bank account to look a little healthy :D
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Newsletters in this list:
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BPS Research Digest - the British Psychological Group digest for research that has happened in the last week. Sometimes a bit click-baity, but I thought it was interesting to sign up fro somethign related to psychology since it's interesting to me. Probably a candidate for unsubscribing though - I don't read them too often.
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Livewire is a finance newsletter that is Australia based - they provide nearly daily emails about stocks, funds, derivatives, news about different companies, videos and article content - it's overwhelming honestly. I keep it for when I dip in and out, and every year they do a 'stock picks of the year' which I like reading (and they do pretty well - the wisdom of the crowds, y'know?)
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Thinking in Bets is a newsletter from Annie Duke, who wrote, well, Thinking in Bets. I read this one because it was how I found out Daniel Kahneman (of Thinking Fast and Slow fame) had passed away. Very sad times - he was an intellectual giant (even if a lot of results have not been replicated) - reading The Undoing Project helped me understand them in a different way, and is definitely highly recommended.
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Cedric from Commoncog deserves its own shoutout as a newsletter - an absolute FAVOURITE from me; a guy who lives in Singapore who has been thinking about thinking, and decision making, and the best way to drive careers, for a really long time. I think I've followed his blog for about 7 years or so - it's extremely well written, lots of great insights, and he provides a bunch of links that are really good to read as well. HIGHLY recommended, but I also know that I probably have like 20 or so emails of his that I haven't read yet, and he sends weekly.
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As you can see, we have Johnn Four, The Marginalian and some of the shareholder stuff again for dividends here. the Sigal Samuel from Vox's Future Perfect is another great weekly that has some thoughts about the future - across not just AI and tech but also the social challenges to come. They often discuss these ideas in conjunction with 80,000 Hours, the organisation that helps people work out how best to align their purpose with their careers.
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More to That is actually one of the newest newsletters that I've signed up to - it's very much WaitButWhy-coded, in a really good way. Here was one recently that I loved reading: Money Is the Megaphone of Identity - a really good piece which insightfully got to 'the amount of money you have does not correlate with how you think about money'.
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The 'Round 2 tips' email is me doing my best this year to get back into footy tipping with a friend of mine's family - I'm not doing overly well but there's so many rounds to go there'll definitely be a comeback :D
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There's a clutch of emails at the end there that are related to my previous newsletter update, so you can see I get around 40 or so emails between these newsletters each week.
Other insights looking past these first 50:
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There are a few other newsletters (like Ben Thompson, Stratechery, Jack Clark from Import AI, Bev from Deeply Unserious, Benedict Evans) which I love that did not come up in this representative sample - each of them are also weekly, or fortnightly, but hadn't come up so far.
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Most of the read emails that I have had are either because of my Celebrancy course, bills, or Amazon orders :D
Knowing me, I'm just gonna keep these signed up to until I run out of email account space.
Let me know how many unread emails you have LOL
Chat soon :)
Let me know if you have any feedback for the newsletter!
✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Balatro - a video game that is best described as a poker roguelite - you play poker hands to get points, you get to use Jokers (which enhance those hands), and then you try and defeat the game which is essentially that getting to a particular points score. It's addictive, and highly recommended! I haven't got into a game in such a fashion for a real long time.
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Fern Brady - the only show I've caught so far, it was great! It's not the Fern you might know from Taskmaster - it's much more raw, but it's still really fun. Recommended while the Comedy Festival is still going on!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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After Appalachian Hospitals Merged Into a Monopoly, Their ERs Slowed to a Crawl - private equity, I assume, but there's something else at work here I think. It's not just a piece about 'what happens when there are monopolies that are bad for customers', but also 'a person who is in pain doesn't give a shit about your median time for ER'.
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Suspicious discontinuities - quite US-based, but really interesting to see a collection of graphs and charts which very starkly show the optimisation because of the law or other regulations. Exit exam scores, drug prosecution (because of possession amounts), Pell (i.e. student hardship) grants and marathon finishing times.
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Singapore Airlines Concorde - did you know Singapore Airlines had a Concorde for a while? A fascinating story! Again, customer experience > speed of execution.