“You eventually learn that true priorities are like arms; if you think you have more than a couple, you’re either lying or crazy.”

He goes on to say that your priorities are what you are doing, not what you might theoretically like to do at any given moment.

“Example. When my daughter falls down and screams, I don’t ask her to wait while I grab a list to determine which of seven notional levels of “priority” I should assign to her need for instantaneous care and affection. Everything stops, and she gets taken care of. Conversely — and this is really the important part — everything else in the universe can wait.”

I like to think of this in terms of checking email at work. Any any given moment during the work day, you can work on a project, or check your email. It is true that checking your email can lead to changes in a current project, but, at the moment when you pulled yourself away from whatever “priority” you were working on to check your email (before you knew what the contents of the email – which might have simply been some company wide memo about Earth Day), your priority was checking your email, not working the project.

As Merlin says, the priority was observed, not assigned.

“There have really only been two dominant UI metaphors in the short history of desktop computing:

• Keyboard + command line
• Mouse + desktop

A third metaphor, the pen, never really gained much traction. [...]

History then brings us to a fourth metaphor, direct interaction via multitouch, introduced to most people by the iPhone. It’s possibly the biggest new UI approach to hit the mass-market in recent memory.”

He goes on to contemplate the value of the “file system”, a potential direction towards “web apps” and more.  I’ve often wondered where things will go long term. The issue seems to be the ever-efficient keyboard. Despite loving the usability of my iPhone, writing an email is still far more precise and quick on a full sized keyboard.

Where do you think we are going next? More of multitouch? Voice recognition?

[via Daring Fireball]

Anyway, this is a test. I’m switching over to something else, and right now MailChimp is looking like a good candidate. Thanks for your patience.

Beyond my “normal” inboxes for home, work, gmail, cell, etc, I also send messages to many of my other email addresses:

• 6 addresses with my Backpack account
• 10 unique addresses for my Highrise account
• An email for my docs.google.com account
• An email for my Flickr account
• An email address for my TwitPic account
• Email for Vimeo (also YouTube)
• Various drop.io pages

It seems like email is working out to be a pretty good all-purpose input. A destination, a subject, a message body, and occasionally an attachment seems to be about all you really need for many different software as a service web sites.

Phone calls require you to stop what you’re doing, go to a quiet place, and concentrate. It requires waiting on the line, listening to hold music, being transferred and possibly having the call lost, all so you have to start over again. You can’t share a phone call with your colleagues, you can’t get someone else’s input or feedback.

…

We get requests every day from people who don’t think email support will cut it and demand a phone number to call us. Their worries are assuaged when they get a reply from me in less than 15 minutes that is informative, helpful and obviously written by a human being. It’s absolutely 100% possible to provide excellent customer care without a phone or phone number, and our company proves that daily.

Their support ticketing system? Gmail.

He quotes the NY Times, who had a great infographic showing that a large part of your office time is lost to “Interruptions by things that aren’t urgent or important, like unnecessary e-mail messages” and Merlin then asks this question:

What does a company get out of its employees spending half their day using an email program?

He goes on to put a lot of thought into the question – and if some days you feel overwhelmed by your email, I highly recommend the read.