Okay, I have to weigh in here on a tentative basis and say that after some reflection, I decided to give Hey a full shot and go with a snippet at the end of my emails:
p/s. You may have noticed that my email came from ___@hey.com. I’m trying out a new email service that is privacy-focused. You don’t need to change anything on your end, though. I’ll still continue to get email no matter which address you use.
Hey is working for me. Like @jmayhugh suggests, I can tell it’s a new paradigm because my ideas about what email is are changing. I’m not saying it’s perfect by any stretch, but I feel the interface better matches the reality of email – that much of it isn’t actually correspondence, but just information, and I don’t need to see most of that info the moment it arrives.
Right now, I feel like email requires less of my attention and that the things that matter will bubble up to the top. I’m also released from the impulse to achieve inbox zero because I can’t. That’s done something that feels, as best as I can describe it, like “relaxing” a part of my attention that was hyper vigilant before.
I reserve the right to completely contradict myself in the future. Until then…