#13: @Hey; how many Mondays do you have left?

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📧 Basecamp’s new email service raised quite some dust over the past few weeks. I’m not sure if this was planned, but I do hope so — for the sake of their marketing savviness. They launched the service and got into a public dispute with Apple, pulling out the oldest trick in the book — free PR by picking a fight with the Goliath. 
This helped drive hundreds of thousands of potential customers to check out and sign up for their new email service — Hey. 

It says it’s reinventing email.  Or is it? The early adopter in me signed up asap and tested it out by forwarding all my private Gmail messages into Hey. 

Without going into the details about how Hey works (do your own homework), I found   Hey to be extra workload, a hassle. 
With Hey, I need another app, new email address, new tool. And it would take time before updating all those services that I sign into with the Gmail account. Why would I go through that. 

Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at email, and Hey isn’t something I could use for my corporate work. On the private side, Gmail is a great service. —Sure, they mine my data and machine-read my emails, and I’ll have to live with that. I don’t recognize it as dangerous or detrimental to my privacy. Not yet. At least not in a way that I’d be ready to move email somewhere else completely. 

Gmail also makes it easy to unsubscribe from crap or to filter it out. Plus, it’s super-convenient with being ubiquitous. So the question I make when considering Hey isn’t if it’s worth the $99/year, but whether the e-mail is a problem for me at all. It’s not. 

But I do agree that the idea and the entire approach is great, and I’m sure they’ll find enough customers among the people that do struggle with their email. I wonder how many of those will find out it’s not the email they struggle with, but their personal discipline. 

How you do anything is how you do everything. If you’re overwhelmed with email, you’re overwhelmed with other things in life as well. You can’t throw $99/year at all of those.  

And that’s what we really need to talk about. The little things that make life. 

You know, the stuff everyone likes to complain about. “I hate email” seems to be a popular one. Lately, we’ve all been hearing about the “Zoom fatigue”, and of course, there are the ever-hated Mondays. —I never understood why would you hate Mondays? It’s not like they’ll ever go away. It’s a stupid approach to living when you fuck up 1/7th of your every week. That’s fifty-two times a year. Why would you do that to yourself. 

I decided to love Mondays. It’s a new beginning, a new opportunity. Like a New Year that you get every week. A chance to improve, get better, be happier. If you think about your life in weeks instead of years, you’ll automatically get more serious about how you spend your time. Your perspective shifts.

Let’s see:
The average life expectancy in the EU is around 80 years. That’s roughly 4174 weeks. Check your age, and see how far through that number you currently are. I’m nearly halfway done. If you need more visual aids, check out this post.

Now, what are you going to do tomorrow, on Monday week #2067? Weekly plans, weekly reviews, and similar practices all of a sudden get a different meaning. 

You see, that’s the beauty of the lebenslanges Lernen — lifelong learning; it helps us discover these little bits of wisdom that we could easily miss while complaining about Mondays. And if the email is a pain point in your life, then go ahead and give Hey a chance. 

Stay Hungry and Stay Foolish — in everything you do. 

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