This was originally supposed to be a blog post about Hey. I wanted to write a longer essay about Basecamp’s new email tool and test if the app actually lives up to its hype.
After playing around with it for a few weeks, my conclusion is this: Hey’s most interesting aspect is not its radical approach to email – but its fresh approach to note taking!
We have long treated notes as a distinct silo in our productivity stack, when we should have integrated them right into our workflows instead. While email might need an overhaul, I see a way bigger opportunity in rethinking digital note taking.
So instead of my Hey review, let’s talk about notes and my idea for a radically new kind of note taking app.
Hey has two interesting notes features.
The first are so-called Thread Notes. These are basically emails to yourself within an email thread that only you can see. You might have seen similar internal notes features in shared inbox tools like Zendesk or Front. Thread Notes in Hey are effectively the single player version of those.
I found Thread Notes super useful in combination with snoozed emails:
“Show me this email again in [insert time] and remind me of [insert note]”
This feels like a way better workflow than adding a note in a separate reminder, to-do, CRM, or note taking app.
a) Because there’s no need for context/app switching. b) You might not even remember that you took a note related to an email when it resurfaces in your inbox a few weeks later.
To-do and reminder apps (and calendars!) work great for tasks that are tied to a specific day or time. But many tasks – and especially notes – are not dependent on time. Their relevance is based on other trigger points. Only when certain conditions are met, should these notes resurface: “If [insert event] is true, then show [note]”
In the case of our email, the note becomes relevant in [insert snooze time] or whenever the recipient replies to the email thread. The fact that many tasks have external dependencies (which are usually linked to an email thread) is one of the reasons I believe that your email inbox should also be the place where you manage your to-dos. You shouldn’t need a separate to-do app.
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The second note feature in Hey are Inbox Notes.
As the name suggests, these notes are added to individual emails in your inbox. Similar to Thread Notes, you can use them to quickly jot down things you need to remember, but they also help you to highlight specific emails.
Thread Notes and Inbox Notes feel similar, but they serve two slightly different use cases. Thread Notes work more like reminders (“Don’t forget X when you reply”), whereas Inbox Notes feel more like bookmarks that highlight the most important messages in a long list of emails.
Together, they remind me of one of my all-time favorite note taking tools: Post-it Notes.