The question you answered by not answering.

Last dispatch I asked you a question: what is one thing you are deliberately not doing right now? I promised to read every reply myself and to share a few of them here. So, in the interest of honest bookkeeping at the bureau, here is the complete collection of replies that arrived: none. Not one. The wire stayed perfectly silent.

For about a day, that stung. Then it started to look like the best possible answer. I asked a few hundred busy people what they skip because focus matters more, and they collectively skipped replying to a newsletter. Point taken. Honestly, I respect it.

But a promise is a promise, and I still owe this dispatch an answer. So let me go first.

What I am not doing: most of my job.

I am writing this from a vacation with my family. And here is the uncomfortable truth about being a solo founder: I have not managed to stop working entirely. I check in once a day. I answer the handful of things only I can answer. That part of the curse is real, and I will not pretend otherwise.

What I have stopped doing is everything else. The pings, the maybes, the fires that look urgent and never are: none of it reaches me here. Franz and Franz Mail quietly hold all of that back, and what is left is small enough to clear before the breakfast table is even set. Then the laptop closes.

That is the honest version of calm over chaos. Not zero work, but only the work that is actually mine, at a moment I chose. Everything else waits, and it turns out almost everything can. The rest of the day belongs to my family, and to gathering energy. Because there is something on the workbench I am genuinely excited about.

On the workbench: what if email arrived like a newspaper?

That vacation setup, only what matters, only at moments I choose, is not just a holiday trick. It is turning into the next chapter for Franz Mail, and you are hearing about it here before anyone else.

The idea is simple to say: your inbox should not be a place you monitor all day. Imagine your email arriving like the morning paper instead. Two or three times a day, at the times you actually reply, Franz hands you everything at once, already sorted. Newsletters and receipts are filed away, always findable and never in your way. The FYIs are ready to skim. And the few emails that truly need you come one at a time, each with a reply already drafted in your voice. Your real voice: your greetings, your length, your sign-offs, even the correct Sie or du for every single contact, learned from how you actually write with them. Edit, send, done. Then Franz goes quiet again until the next delivery, and only genuinely urgent mail from people who matter to you breaks through in between.

And because it is Franz: all of it computed on your machine, from the email accounts you already have. No new address, no migration, nothing leaving your device. Classic Franz Mail stays exactly as it is; this will be a mode you choose.

It does not have a public name yet, and I am not promising dates from a deck chair. But it is real, it is taking shape, and this dispatch is where you will hear about it first.

I asked for a reason: the idea above only works if the paper arrives when you actually read it. Last time I asked for a written reply and the wire stayed silent, so that time the bar was on the floor.

The cable is always open. Reply to any dispatch, about anything, and you are writing straight to me.

— Stefan, founder of Franz