Inbox Zero
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EMAIL! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? (ABSOLUTELY NOTHING?)
Photo by Alex Dugquem from Pexels
You know that feeling when you come back from vacation and open your email? Sheer dread? Downright terror? Complete overwhelm? That’s basically how I feel every time I open my inbox.
Have you heard of inbox zero? It’s an (insane) concept created by Merlin Mann where you organize email in such a way that you get your inbox down to zero at the end of each day.
Y’all, I’m so far from inbox zero, it’s not even funny. Actually, it is funny—if having 10,412 unread emails is something to laugh about. I’m so far from inbox zero that I don’t even aspire to ever reaching such a lofty goal. Getting into the single digit thousands would be good enough for me!
Correspondence is something that has always taken time, even before the days of the World Wide Web. I envision someone at the turn of the century taking time in the evening to read through their letters and write thoughtful responses (with a quill pen, of course!). (Can you tell that I was raised on Little Women and Jo March is my favorite literary character?) But spending a few hours a week writing letters with a flourish of your ink pen sounds lovely compared to what correspondence looks like now – slogging through countless demands for donations (smells like election season!), unsolicited sales pitches and promotions, and sensational news headlines. Basically, wading through mountains of trash to get to the emails that you actually want to open.
A few years ago, my partner convinced me to do away with the categories created by Google—Social, Promotions, Updates—and turn my inbox into one big cesspool where all the categories mix together. “It takes some time to unsubscribe from things you don’t want, but eventually your inbox will only include emails that you want to receive.”
I can officially say that he was wrong. As much as I unsubscribe (as this book about email anxiety is titled), the unwanted emails keep on coming. It feels like a game of whack-a-mole, but a lot more frustrating.
I used to be on my email a lot more frequently that I am now. These days, I’ve taken the opposite approach. I’m so negligent of my inbox that messages I want to read are buried beneath mountains of political marketing. I’m somewhat tempted to implement the category approach once again and see if that inbox gives me less anxiety.
Like everything else that I write about in this newsletter, email is a tool, not a lifestyle; we shouldn’t let it take over our life. And so, I will do my best to wrangle this beast so that’s it’s working for me, instead of causing me a headache. Wish me luck as I navigate the wild jungle of my email inbox – machete in hand!
Tip of the Week
Reading up on how to achieve inbox zero, I like the notion that you should always take an action with each email you open: delete, delegate, respond, defer, or do. This way, you don’t have to deal with the same email twice. It makes me think about Anne Helen Peterson’s concept of “errand paralysis”; instead of doing something right off the bat, we put it off forever until it’s a weight on our back along with a whole other collection of undone errands.
Digital Life Around the Web
I'm thrilled to have my essay about my social media sabbatical featured on this list of incredible women writers! Thanks Orion Magazine!
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