A recent short piece in the Wall Street Journal (inspired by an earlier post on LinkedIn) described one executive’s process for managing the “never ending treadmill” of his email correspondence.

Tony Hsieh the founder and CEO of Zappos.com calls his approach Yesterbox. “The idea is to go through yesterday’s messages today.” Instead of reflexively launching immediate replies to emails that appear throughout the day, he saves all but the most urgent messages for next-day action.  Urgent notes receive quick replies; less important messages are parked in his Yesterbox folder for attention tomorrow.

I once got my Inbox down to a single message.  That didn't last very long. The constant daily flow of email reminds me of the equally productive time I’ve spent digging in the wet sand at the edge of the ocean in past summers. The tide is relentless.  It constantly sets me back and it wins every time.  Not only does Tony Hsieh’s Yesterbox process help keep distractions under control, his system provides a tangible preview of the size of each day’s email wave and helps him work his way through his messages without the disruption of the incoming flood of new mail.

I like the idea, and I love the name Yesterbox. I also like that it has something in common with a very different kind of story that I read about recently.  This was a tale about a very old-school but highly effective delayed messaging methodology that was employed for very different purposes more than 75 years ago by intelligence authorities in France at the beginning of the Second World War. 

During the late winter and early spring months of 1940, the Deuxieme Bureau, France’s counter-espionage service, was especially concerned with treasonous or reckless correspondence.  Although the full horror of World War II would not explode until mid-May of that year, France and Germany were officially at war.  Careless or intentional sharing of military, economic or political secrets could potentially tilt the early advantage to France’s mortal enemy. 

The Bureau surreptitiously examined the mail of several individuals whose allegiance was in question.  However it was simply not possible to read every typed or hand-written letter that passed through the French postal system. 

Instead, a casual process that was positively ingenious in its simplicity was employed to keep the lid on secret information, especially time-sensitive information. According to the author and one-time British intelligence agent H. Montgomery Hyde, the French postal authorities simply delayed the delivery of most overseas mail for a week or two.  The assumption was that that passage of time would diminish the value of the delayed information. 

Information has a shelf life. Its value and its sensitivity decay over time.   That’s sometimes not such a bad thing, especially when today’s sense of urgency is artificial, ephemeral, questionable or dangerous.

Originally posted to LinkedIn on October 4, 2016