Hsieh, who is also investing in a multi-million-dollar effort to revitalize Downtown Las Vegas, recently found that email was becoming a massive drain on productivity.
"In 2012, I felt like my email had gotten out of control," Hsieh wrote in a LinkedIn post. "I felt like it was a never-ending treadmill, and a lot of important emails I would actually end up never getting to because they would take a long time to respond to and I would just end up procrastinating… and several months later, they were still unanswered."
His solution was something called the "Yesterbox system." It's outlined in full here, but the main points are:
1. Your "to do" list each day is simply yesterday's email inbox (hence, "Yesterbox").
2. If it can wait 48 hours without causing harm, then you are not allowed to respond to any emails that come in today, even if it's a simple one-word reply.
3. When processing yesterday's inbox, you must process 10 of yesterday's emails before you're allowed to look at any emails that are coming in today."