Wasting Time With Inbox Zero?


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Came across an article today with the title Trying to empty your inbox is a waste of time. Being a practitioner of Inbox Zero, this of course caused by hackles to raise at the suggestion that a tool I use is a waste of time (though there are plenty of others out there criticizing Inbox Zero). This is not to say Inbox Zero will work or should be used by everyone, but I do not think I have been wasting my time. With that said and after reading the article, I do think the author makes a couple good points that are still consistent with the philosophy of Inbox Zero.

Why be organized?

The first point made in the article that I think we all need to remember when examining productivity tools is "to what end?" For me personally, I like things to be neat and organized, whether in real life or in the digital tools that I use. So having a clean inbox falls right in line with that. Outside of that intangible though, and especially if you are someone who is not bothered by clutter, the question we all have to ask is why we pursue any particular tool. It should be, as the author points out, to "make substantial progress toward your most important personal and professional goals".

How much energy?

The second point I thought was important is the level of energy used in organization systems. In the article, the author references Laura Vanderkam who has written about spending too much energy trying to process and organize the stuff that is in our inbox. Vanderkam even claims we will never reach the end of our inbox, so getting to inbox zero will never happen. I disagree with that part since I can pretty consistently keep my inbox empty.

The issue of how much energy to spend on organizing is worth exploring a bit more though. I used to maintain a bunch of folders and labels for my emails, whether it was in my Gmail account or in my corporate Exchange accounts. I did find a sense of order to having everything organized.

At some point though, I realized technology had surpassed my ability to keep things organized. What do I mean by this? Just like Vanderkam suggests, when I looked at the energy required to maintain all these separate labels and folders, I concluded I could be much more efficient by using the search functions available in the tools I used. This meant there was really no need to get things into separate buckets - I could just use one big bucket and then use search to find what I needed.

I will admit that was a bit of an internal struggle for me. As much as I enjoy technology, it took a bit of a paradigm shift for me to rely more heavily on that tech to do something I previously did myself. After close to a year of practicing this new way of doing things though, I think the results have paid off. I do still maintain a few key folders for ongoing, active projects, but in general in Gmail I now either delete or archive all of my inbound emails as part of the processing stage. This has resulted in much greater efficiency for me as I basically need only one click to process an email.

I am currently playing around with some of the advanced "star" capabilities just for the purpose of keeping a few emails handily available without cluttering my inbox. Otherwise, I rely on search to find old emails if I need them. Which means I can pretty consistently maintain the following view for my Gmail inbox:




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