If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.
- Calvin Coolidge
"Mr Coolidge's genius for inactivity is developed to a very high point. It is not an indolent inactivity. It is a grim, determined, alert inactivity, which keeps Mr Coolidge occupied constantly" - Columnist Walter Lippmann, 1926
The key is to use a ranking procedure that is appropriate for the interval, so that the reader doesn't get new stuff for that day, but the best over N days (or N seconds -- not everyone is Richard Stallman).
This feature may be silly and unoriginal; but I'm commenting on the internet so I thought it fit.
[Edit: when I said "delivered" I didn't mean by email! Just "updated".]
There's a good summary of Mathic life at http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Mathic_Society (the site contains spoilers, but that page looks safe to me).
http://news.ycombinator.com/best
It's really useful, but it's somewhat obscure since there's no link to it from the main page. (You can find it under "Lists" at http://news.ycombinator.com/lists)
i only could find the cache: http://bit.ly/c9dWWF
Why? [edit: Okay, I didn't see that he could only find the cache. Just for future reference doron, at the top of the webshot is displayed the URL.]
Here's the URL unshortened and uncached: http://www.slowlab.net/slowmail.html
It seems to be working so far - my productivity has gone up and the pace of email correspondence has slowed (so a 10 email conversation takes a couple of weeks now rather than a few hours).
Several people have commented that they enjoy talking with me for this reason; they don't feel pressured to reply "right now" and enjoy getting a response after some undetermined delay.
I sometimes wonder if the march of technology has had some downsides in terms of "right here right now" thinking.
Surely everyone who knows to consult Stallman knows how to operate a GNUsignal.
"Being very detached from the Hollywood scene, Murray does not have an agent or manager and reportedly only fields offers for scripts and roles using a personal telephone number with a voice mailbox that he checks infrequently. This practice has the downside of sometimes preventing him from taking parts that he had auditioned for and was interested in, such as that of Sulley in Monsters, Inc, Bernard Berkman in The Squid and the Whale, Frank Ginsburg in Little Miss Sunshine and Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He also regretted losing the chance to play Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit when he heard that he was considered for the role, which he says he would have definitely accepted."
I don't think turning down major opportunities through outright neglect is ever a good habit, even for those with a surfeit.
> It's amazing how many problems resolve themselves when given sufficient neglect.
True, but there's a big downside.
Given what RMS does all day and what seems to matter to him, this seems perfectly rational to me. Consider how old the GNU tools are, or how long some of them go between revisions. I don't think Stallman needs or wants to keep up with things in real time. I think Stallman is like Tolkien's Ents - he isn't slow, he's just operating on a different timescale to the rest of us.
It's the same sort of logic behind Tim Ferriss not answering his phone or Don Knuth doing his email in six-month batches - if you create enough latency in your connection to the world, you bring everyone else to your pace and avoid having to worry about minutiae. It's amazing how many problems resolve themselves when given sufficient neglect.