Inbox Zero (Premium)

When the pandemic started and those who could were forced to work from home, people started asking me for tips. After all, I’ve been working from home for almost 30 years. Surely, I had some ideas.

And I did, though I’ve been doing this for so long that it never occurred to me to document what worked for me and what didn’t. I just kind of did things the way I did them.

And perhaps as important, we’re all different. So what works for me might not work for you. Too, we’re all works in progress, and I find it useful to reevaluate workflows and habits from time to time and test new ways of doing things. Every once in a while you have a nice ah-ha moment where something clicks you make a positive change.

But at a high level, what I’ve learned is that I need to work disruption-free to be truly productive. And that, as an inverse of sorts, when I’m literally being very productive at the moment, I magically ignore distractions because I’m so focused. The trick is getting there. And then staying there.

There are two general things that prevent me from being productive: time-based requirements and literal interruptions.

Time-based requirements are scheduled events, like meetings, which to my mind are very popular with those who don’t create content but instead need to justify their existence by proving to others that they’re working. I get it, I guess: after all, anyone can see what I’m doing for the most part by just looking at the website. (Though there are times I’m wrapped up in research or writing for books that the work I’m doing isn’t so obvious.)

I do everything I can to avoid meetings and I spread out other requirements, like appointments, as much as possible because these are the times when I’m not getting work done. That said, I’ve been doing this for so long that I’ve noticed some important downsides that may start impacting those who have only recently started working from home. For example, I now find it tedious to go distances that others find uneventful; I’d rather go out to eat within a few minutes’ drive vs. a 20- to 30-minute drive. Even moving my home office from the first floor of our house to the basement was bothersome because it was further away. I know.

Interruptions are things like notifications, phone calls, or messages, especially unexpected ones. I find these kinds of things so problematic that I disable almost all notifications on my PCs and devices, and for those I do leave on, I disable almost all notification sounds. (And my Apple Watch has added a new level of notification annoyance, but that’s another story.) Because I get up normally every day on my own to work, I never have to set an alarm, but on days when I’m traveling I do of course have to set an alarm, and there is nothing less welcome than that sound. Except of course, my inability to sleep properly the night before because I’m not used to setting an alarm and I’m worried I’m going to screw it up and oversleep. (An alarm is a nightmare combination of a time-based requirement and an interruption, I guess.)

But despite the shift in recent years towards chat-based collaboration and online meetings with tools like Microsoft Teams, I continue to struggle with that oldest of collaboration and communications tools, email. And it occurred to me over the holidays—yes, about three months ago—that I needed to finally get that under control. And when it comes to email, the solution is obvious. It’s just not easy.

Yes, I am talking about Inbox Zero.

What I decided at the time was that I would give this another try as a sort of New Year’s resolution kind of thing. That would I aggressively and continuously work to keep my inbox down to, if not literally zero unread and undealt-with emails, then at least some minimal number of emails. The goal, of course, is to stay more organized and on top of things. And to be less stressed every time I look at my inbox, which is always the first pinned tab in my web browser.

Three months-ish into this, I am happy to report that I’ve mostly kept at it. As I write this, I have fewer than five emails sitting in my inbox, and all of them will be archived within days as various agreed-upon embargoed news milestones come and go.

As with any other bad habit—drinking, say—I’ve had lapses. In this case, there have been times in January, February, and/or March, during which the number of emails in my inbox has exceeded five or so, and when the list of unread emails has in fact, gone below the fold (if that makes sense), and has required me to later scurry to catch-up on triaging them all and culling the list. In my defense, I’m only human, but perhaps more to the point, I’ve also been under a lot of stress lately, with the house sale and other things. And that’s what happens. But I’ve kept at it.

Keeping my inbox in a minimalist state requires work. And to be clear, I mean daily, many times per day, repetitive work. It’s not something you can set and forget.

And now I live by rules. You know, like in Road House. Well, not exactly.

I try to respond to people, always. (And if I don’t, sorry, but if email stacks up, I will delete swathes of it without regret.) I always block unwanted spammy/PR-type outreaches and then report the senders to Google. I always mark important emails—like those vague product embargoes I’ve noted above—as such, and I keep them in the Inbox until the embargo arrives and I or Laurent have written about the product or service announcement in question.

Interestingly, my wife engaged in a similar Inbox Zero experiment at around the same time, though we only learned that the other was doing similarly in conversation later. Curious about this, I asked her about how she did things, and there is one major difference between her approach and mine: she will “snooze” emails that don’t need to be dealt with immediately, which causes them to hide and then pop up later when whatever time limit expires. I recoiled at this, and I would never do such a thing. But again, everyone is different.

And while this isn’t new to my Inbox Zero work, I would like to emphasize something I’ve been doing for years that I suspect many others—especially those of a Microsoft Outlook bent—do not. And that’s this: I do not in any way organize my emails into logical containers of any kind, be they folders or something else. Instead, all of my emails exist in just one of a few different places: my Inbox, my Archive, or Deleted mail. (Inbox is for new mail that needs to be dealt with, Archive is for old email that is dealt with but I wish to save, and Deleted mail is everything else.)

The reason for this is simple: it is far more efficient—meaning faster and easier—to find an email with search than it is to use some ridiculous filing system. Yes, I know this is exactly the opposite of how I handle document storage, where I have a seemingly complex filing system. But a document archive and an email store, despite the similarities, are not the same. More important, they’re not used the same. That is, I will never browse my emails. And an entire email thread comes up in easily in search. Think about it.

Or don’t. Again, everyone is different. But if email is among those things that stress you out, at least find some system—Inbox Zero or something else—that will help you overcome that stress and get in front of what is, to me, a mountain of responsibility and time-suck. And get on with the rest of your life. Which surely isn’t centered on email. It shouldn’t be, anyways.

But for me, Inbox Zero seems to be working. And I’m going to keep at it.