Ten rules for a calmer workday.

Ten rules for a calmer workday.

You know the moment: you open one app to answer one message, and twenty minutes later you're somewhere else entirely, the message still unanswered. Franz exists because of that moment. So this issue is dedicated to it: ten standing orders for getting through a working day with your attention intact. Steal the ones that work, argue with the rest by return cable.

1. Answer in two minutes or file it. If a reply takes less than two minutes, send it now. Everything else gets a place you'll actually look at again. An open tab isn't a system.
2. Kill every badge that has never made you act. Go through your apps once and be hard about it: has this red dot ever changed what you did next? If not, it's decoration that interrupts you.
3. Check messages at set times, not all the time. A reply that arrives ninety minutes later is almost always fine. Peeking at the same message four times before you answer it costs quite a lot of attention.
4. Write tomorrow's first task down before you stop. Ten seconds in the evening save you the twenty minutes of figuring out where you were.
5. Give the day working hours, even if nobody set them for you. Founders and freelancers don't get office hours handed to them. Set them anyway, and let everything outside them wait.
6. Say the mail you keep putting off out loud. The message you've owed someone for a week is usually one you'd explain to their face in thirty seconds. Dictate it, clean it up, send it.
7. Unsubscribe instead of archiving. A newsletter you archive unread will cost you the same decision again next week. Present company excluded, I hope.
8. Do the email you're avoiding first. It leaks attention into everything else until it's sent. I speak with some authority here: the task I've dodged for a week usually turns out to be half an hour of actual work. The week of dodging, that was the expensive part.
9. Decline the meeting that has no question in it. If nobody can say what's being decided, it's a status update, and those can be messages.
10. Put all your messaging in one window. Switching between six apps all day is a job of its own. I can recommend an app for this one. You're reading its newsletter ;)

The newspaper has a name.

Two dispatches ago I showed you an idea: email that arrives like the morning paper. Two or three deliveries a day, at the times you actually reply, everything sorted, the few mails that truly need you arriving with a reply already drafted in your voice, and a quiet inbox in between. I promised you'd hear its name here first.

It's called Franz Mail Zero. Franz Zero for short.

Yes, like inbox zero. The difference is that you're not the one doing the zeroing. Franz files the noise, drafts the replies, and hands you the day's mail in a few deliveries instead of a drip.

And this isn't a name in search of a product. For the past eight months I've been testing the hard parts on my own inbox with internal tooling: the automatic drafting, and the harder problem underneath it, making sure a draft sticks to the facts. Franz Zero grows out of that work.

It's still on the workbench, and you know the house rule on dates by now. But the name is out, here first, as promised.

Confirmed.

Franz fills your logins from 1Password now. A small padlock in the sign-in fields, one click, and you're in, one-time codes included. Franz Pro, on macOS, Windows next.

Mail search counts for real. Ask the assistant for every invoice from a quarter and you get the actual number from the database, the messages grouped by sender, and every attachment a click away.

The calendar shows the whole day, midnight to midnight, and working hours shade everything outside them.

And if Franz never opened for you after a .deb install on Ubuntu, 6.7.1 is the version to get.

That's the short version. The changelog has the rest.

On the workbench.

Cross-service search. One keystroke opens a small bar on top of whatever you're doing, and it searches everything at once: your services, your people, your mail, the message you half remember from a chat you can't place. Today every service has its own search box. This is one for all of them.

This one isn't far off: it ships with the next Franz release.

Vote by return cable.

Last dispatch I asked whether you'd ever written to the person who made your software. Best turnout the cable has had, and it came back split exactly in half: half of you have done both, the thank-you and the bug report, and half have never written at all. Nobody picked just one. Apparently once you start writing to developers, you don't stop.

New question, completely different territory. Everyone seems to have picked a side by now, and I'm curious where this readership lands.

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

– Stefan, founder of Franz