I have four e-mails in my inbox right now, but I’m aiming for that number to be zero. Like many practitioners of the “Inbox Zero” system, I treat my inbox like a to-do list, with each e-mail representing a task: complete this assignment, file that banking statement, restart my modem at home for a free Internet speed upgrade from Time Warner Cable (for which I will likely be surreptitiously charged at a later date). Everything else, once it’s been replied to or followed up on, gets archived.
Inbox Zero is essentially a rudimentary filing system, popularized by the productivity evangelist and lifehacker Merlin Mann, who founded the blog 43folders.com in 2004. At forty-six, the boyish, bespectacled Mann is something of a hipster geek—he took cues from David Allen’s time-management bible, “Getting Things Done,” (often referred to by its devotees as “G.T.D.”) and made them tech- and Web-friendly. I was introduced to G.T.D. by an aspiring lifehacker friend in 2007, around the time when Mann gave a Google Tech Talk to Google employees about his revolutionary e-mail-management system. He uses a lot of jargon, like “tool-agnostic framework” and “task-tracking,” and breaks every decision about what to do when faced with an e-mail into five possibilities: delete, delegate, respond, defer, do. The ultimate goal in his system of “processing” your e-mail by “converting to action” sounds like something halfway between Scientology and Zen: “process to zero.”
Without actually having seen Mann’s video, I came up with a bare-bones version of Inbox Zero for myself, which began with archiving my entire inbox—cutting my losses and starting from manufactured scratch. It was exhilarating and terrifying; I felt like the guests on “What Not To Wear,” when Stacy and Clinton make them trash their entire wardrobe. Of course, one of the many reasons that the Inbox Zero system appeals to me is that I am addicted to the gratification that comes from tidying up. As teen-agers, my sister and I had very different philosophies about bedroom management. In her room, you could barely see the floor for all the clothes and books and miscellanea, the better to know where everything was at any moment. My room had the appearance of spotlessness, with the help of several underbed drawers, a desk hutch, and some filing cabinets. They were both respectable philosophies, with obvious advantages and disadvantages (my father once discovered a moldy sandwich under my bed).
For me, Inbox Zero is a coping mechanism for the anxiety created by a constant flux of e-mail: the basic philosophy is “out of sight, out of mind.” On the one hand, it feels great not to linger on past conversations; but on the other hand, I forget whole interactions as soon as they’re gone from my screen. I’ve traded short-term memory for a Googleable inbox, which maybe isn’t such a bad thing. As long as you can remember some text from the message, or who sent it, you can call it up in seconds, much like you might Google anything else using keywords on the Internet. In some ways, the Inbox Zero system is just a game of whack-a-mail—as soon as you reply and archive one thread, up pops another. And what about when you actually reach Inbox Zero? It doesn’t feel like winning. It feels like staring into the abyss.
Inbox Zero, like diets and other self-help regimens, is especially rewarding when it becomes social—you can learn from and share tips with others (it is probably also just as annoying for your friends and family). Recently, I’ve been keeping up with a few like-minded people on Twitter about the status of their inboxes, and it’s like a never-ending electronic game of UNO: all of us alternately gloating and commiserating about how near or far we are from Inbox Zero.
Originally, Mann intended his time- and productivity-management techniques to free people from their inboxes. The idea was to get in and out as effectively and as quickly as possible so you could focus on the creative work that mattered most to you—the project, the book, the assignment, whatever. I seem to have gotten stuck, forever in my inbox, digging holes just to fill them with dirt. But I kind of like it in here; I feel connected and up to date, I can chat with my friends, and I don’t feel like I’m sacrificing my personal life for my work life, or vice versa.
However, not everyone is like me: one friend recently posted a screenshot of her Gmail inbox on Instagram: she had twelve thousand unopened e-mails in her inbox (six thousand one hundred and fifty-seven of which were marked “Important”), and four hundred and forty-two drafts. Increasingly, it feels as though the only reprieve from the influx of e-mail, whether self-imposed or otherwise, is to get the hell out of your inbox. I know one friend who doesn’t check his e-mail on the weekends, and another recommended something called “Inbox Pause,” which essentially allows you to put off receiving new e-mail as long as it’s turned on, much like a mute button. I thought about this technique during yesterday’s widespread Gmail outage, which came as something of a relief, though not without a sting of shock.
In a twenty-minute video posted on his site in August of 2009, a harried-looking Mann, working on three hours of sleep, announced that he would be writing a book about Inbox Zero. He’s wearing a dirty, brown T-shirt (the same one he wore while giving the original Inbox Zero talk), his hair looks like something a One Direction member might be jealous of—and, for a guy who is normally gregarious and upbeat, he sounds completely manic. In the video, he also criticizes people like me who get stuck in the hamster wheel of Inbox Zero—we’re doing it wrong, he says. The publication date of his book on Amazon is listed as February 21, 2012, but I also found it listed on Goodreads.com for November 15, 2014. Near the end of the video, in reference to whether he might be updating inboxzero.com, Mann says “I’m done committing. I think. I don’t know, I can’t commit to that, though.” I’m worried about Merlin Mann. I was looking forward to his book, but maybe he got bogged down with e-mails.
As for me, I’ll be here in my inbox, a boat against the current.
Illustration by Laurent Cilluffo.