Over the years I’ve wistfully heard about people making zero inbox a commitment of theirs.
For the uninitiated, this is basically just having zero unread messages in your email inbox. You get new stuff in, you read it once or twice a day or however often your unique need demands — reply if needed, ignore it or leave it alone or delete it if you don’t — and you get it down to zero unread messages.
Rinse and repeat the next day.
In the past I’ve had unread messages numbering into the hundreds, for sure. Maybe even into four figures? Okay, almost certainly into four figures.
To clarify, this isn’t stuff of any particular importance. I always read email from family and friends or work or the kid’s school, etc., when I see it (although sometimes such things have gotten lost under the deluge of other, unimportant emails). The vast bulk of the rest tend to be weekly deals from the likes of grocery stores, and free newsletters of (perhaps one-time) interest that usually come once or twice a week. But if you don’t stay on top of clearing them out, they can add up fast.
Faster for some, of course, depending on who has your email address for sending you what. Can I just say I know people who’ve let their unread emails get into the five figure range? As bad as I thought I was with mine, that certainly put my own unread numbers into perspective. You know who has time to go through five figures of emails? Not someone who let it get to five figures in the first place.
But then it occurred to me a while back: If I’m so often ignoring the weekly grocery flyer sales anyway, because I can just look them up any time I want to, why am I bothering to stay on their mailing lists? If I’m not interested enough in keeping up with these newsletters that are only sometimes of interest anyway, is there really any point in staying subscribed?
My recent change of email address had some downstream effects, not the least of which being that I needed to recreate my preferred system of having certain emails automatically transferred into certain customized email folders — one for each newsletter, for instance, and these days, one for each of the voiceover job website I’m getting a foothold in; all in order to keep my main email feed clear for family and friends, etc. — and setting up that system takes a bit of time and effort. And in doing that all over again from scratch a few times of late, I did at times revisit the question of whether or not one subscription or another was really worth getting any more. Particularly if it was among the ones I had historically putting off long-term anyway.
Having now finally settled (one hopes) on a specific email service and kind of starting with a clean slate, I made it a goal to try to reach inbox zero. And with some time and focus and being more than a bit ruthless with cutting out routine contact from automated sources I didn’t really need or want routine contact from, I’ve now hit inbox zero status for a few weeks running.
And I have to say, it’s a bit addictive. By that I don’t mean I’m constantly getting a fix by checking on my emails to keep the unread numbers down. On the contrary, I’m on email way less than I used to be. In part I’m trying to take the recently learned advice of people like Matthew Dicks and keep needless distractions and time-sucks to a minimum to help keep productivity moving, and dawdling on email can be (has at times for me been) a big problem in that regard. So it seems it’s now become a happy mix of wanting to keep my inbox numbers down, and changes I’ve made to subscriptions helping that along, at a time when I don’t want to spend too long on email anyway. Wins all around.
I don’t see this trend going anyway any time soon.
Having finally reached inbox zero, it’s no longer daunting to go into email and see huge numbers of unread messages. It’s one less (totally needless) stress that I’ve removed for myself. And I want to keep it that way.