The case against inbox zero
The story of Merlin Mann’s email u-turn | 5-min read
Last week, while I was driving across the country and writing about trolls, I got a very curt email from Google announcing that I’d reached 97% of my account storage limit and would soon face consequences. Initially, I assumed it was the thousands of photos I’ve been storing on my drive (also trolls), but I was wrong; it’s the 98,168 emails that have been maturing like fine wine in my inbox.
This level of email accumulation might trigger panic in many, but I made peace with my pile-up long ago. In my last job, I received more emails a day than was humane or tenable. And statistically, so do you. The average worker receives over 120 emails a day and spends nearly 3 hours, or 30% of their workday, dealing with their inbox. In my case, I spent years trying and failing to keep a tidy inbox, practicing all manner of rigorous and not-so-rigorous methods to get my unread numbers down. One day, I reached a breaking point and declared the battle lost; I decided that there were better uses of my time, and I renounced email management entirely.
Although surrendering to the email influx was liberating and freed me up for nobler pursuits like eating and sleeping, I always carried a little pouch of shame. I never let coworkers see my inbox and sometimes worried that if the IT gods ever probed my corner of the cloud, it might lead to instant demotion. For some reason, my inability to manage email traffic felt like some sort of deeper moral or professional failing. I felt constant stress about my inbox. And statistically, so do you.
That’s because of “Inbox Zero.”
Inbox Zero is an approach to email management introduced in the mid-2000s by Merlin Mann, a productivity blogger. It offered a magical solution to the overwhelming inbox: a system of message archiving and deleting with the ultimate goal of ending each day with an empty inbox. An empty inbox, the approach implies, is a sort of professional nirvana where all tasks are complete, and you can close your laptop with a breath of well-earned inner peace.
Even if you’ve never heard of Inbox Zero before, its tenets have very likely seeped into your subconscious; because whether you clear your inbox or not, nearly everyone with an @ assumes they’re supposed to.
The wild thing, my friends, is that that Inbox Zero turns out to be a big and kind of intriguing myth.
The rise and attempted fall of Inbox Zero
When Merlin Mann shared in Inbox Zero method to an audience at Google HQ in 2007, it was an instant hit. At that time, email traffic was rapidly rising, and the office world was hungry for time management and productivity solutions tailored to the problems of the digital age. Mann was invited across the world to speak on his approach, and major companies hired him to train their workforce on how to achieve Inbox Zero. He got a book deal.
And then, very suddenly, Merlin Mann changed his mind. Four years after he unveiled his approach, he published a very personal essay in which he reveals that Inbox Zero was doing more harm than good. He writes about his father and then-3-year-old daughter, confessing that he had spent more time clearing emails than being with his family. The drive for personal productivity had been robbing him of life. “I’m done cranking,” he wrote. “And I’m ready to make a change.”
As writer Oliver Burkeman reflects:
“The allure of the doctrine of time management is that, one day, everything might finally be under control. Yet work in the modern economy is notable for its limitlessness. And if the stream of incoming emails is endless, Inbox Zero can never bring liberation: you’re still Sisyphus, rolling his boulder up that hill for all eternity – you’re just rolling it slightly faster.”
And yet, ten years on, we still cling to the empty inbox as a personal and professional aspiration – one that very few of us will achieve and many more will waste time and energy attempting.
Rome wasn’t toppled in a day
There are many reasons our obsession with Inbox Zero persists – a wide and well-funded industry of productivity gurus, books, and products that keep pushing us to clear our inbox. And then there’s us: millions of humans dealing with overload and seeking solutions. There is comfort in believing we’re just one productivity hack away from handling it all; we all want to Marie Kondo our life.
But as Mann and many others have shown, we can’t fold and archive our way to love and light. (Or to promotions, raises, and a lasting sense of accomplishment.)
So now what?
As with most challenges, the solution to email overwhelm is both top-down and bottom-up. As Cal Newport, a computer scientists and productivity writer, argues, organizations need to make efforts to drive down useless email traffic through new technologies and approaches to task management. That will take time and major cultural shifts, but I have hope that the rise of remote work will drive new solutions to communication in and outside the workplace.
More immediately, we as individuals can take the radical step to free ourselves of the misguided pressure to clear our inboxes, to stop pushing ourselves to attain the unattainable and ultimately distracting. And, as Mann realized, wouldn’t you rather be doing something else?
You, too, can find peace in the pile-up. (Just remember to check your storage limits from time to time).
for the curious…
Americans Are Obsessed With Tidying Up. But There's a Downside to Being Organized
Time Magazine | 6-min read
“The more of a mess our internal world becomes, the more likely we are to grab onto something that gives us this sense of peace or this shiny answer that seems easy or simple,” she says. While a little tidying can be a calming diversion, she says, it’s a temporary bandage, not a cure.”
Why Time Management is Ruining Our Lives
The Guardian | Read or Listen | 34 mins
“In an era of insecure employment, we must constantly demonstrate our usefulness through frenetic doing, and time management can give you a valuable edge.”
The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done: How personal productivity transformed work—and failed to
The New Yorker | 32-min read
“We must, in other words, acknowledge the futility of trying to tame our frenzied work lives all on our own, and instead ask, collectively, whether there’s a better way to get things done.”
Don’t Reply to Your Emails; The case for inbox infinity
The Atlantic | 8-min read
Molly Beck, the CEO of the podcast-software company Messy.fm, said she realized Inbox Zero would never work for her the day she achieved it. “I wanted to email my work BFF to tell her I finally did it [reached Inbox Zero],” Beck said. “But I was worried she would email me back.”
Time Spent on Emails Calculator
A tool that calculates how much time you’ll spend in your life answering emails and offering a list of alternate activities and potential accomplishments.
