One Year of Hey

It’s time for me to leave this innovative but frustrating new take on email behind

It was my fault: I knew from the start that Hey wasn’t for me.

Still, I soldiered on because I was excited by the first real re-think of email since its inception; I wanted to make sure I gave it a proper try. I did my best to adapt, to use it as it’s designed to be used…but it’s been nearly a year now and I’m afraid I have to throw in the towel.

For all of its benefits — and there are several important ones—Hey turned my seamless experience with email into a slow, frustrating, opaque mess that I haven’t been able to get used to and that has negatively impacted my productivity and email efficiency for months. I won’t go into too much detail around why because I covered the majority of the reasoning in my initial pieces about it.

Instead, I want to discuss what the process of migrating away from Hey was like.

A Middle Ground

At first, I thought I should try to adapt my usage of Hey to something less fragmented by using only the Imbox and pretending the Feed and Paper Trail don’t exist.

After all, one of my core complaints was that the cognitive load of deciding which “bucket” to put email into (and seeing when there are…