Leaving the Cult of Zero Inbox
“I hate email,” says my fifteen year old daughter. My daughter has to be coerced to check her email (the one I set up for her when she was born) because it is not part of her digital life. It is her version of a mailbox stuffed with paper catalogues and junk mail: a bunch of content she didn’t ask for cluttering the few things that matter. The generational divide is real.
My relationship with email has evolved in a full circle during my professional lifetime. I went to college when the wonders of the internet became a reality. If you had AOL at home, you were lucky. When you went to college, you got your first real email address. We had mud chat rooms where we communicated with students at other schools. Sally Jesse and Ricki Lake had plenty of chaotic and salacious talk show episodes about people who MET ON THE INTERNET! It was a strange but wonderful time for communication that flattened the world.
By the time I was properly in the workforce, the professional belief system developed that a zero inbox was a standard objective. Email become both the currency and the metric for performance. I spent a solid decade constantly “catching up on my email.” I taught graduate level courses on email etiquette and effective communication. As someone with an English Literature degree who loves writing, I used email as my creative outlet. I crafted delicious prose, taking hours sometimes to perfect a message. I internalized the pressure of fast responses and assigned a certain portion of my own value to inbox management.
Now? Email gets a right-sized amount of real estate in my day.
When I take an emotional inventory and truly feel no stress that I haven’t been able to access email for hours or even a day, I marvel that who I am today grew from who I used to be. How did I got from the person who constantly stressed about each and every incoming and outgoing message to the person who doesn’t even keep work email on their phone?
I credit three things:
I got older. Turns out it is true that the older you get, the wiser you are. I have become ruthless about how I spend my time and energy. Surprisingly, spending hours in an inbox doesn’t rank higher than talking to people, creating things, hanging out with my family, or taking a nice hot bath.
I evolved with technology. I have always been an early adopter, gadget geek, and lover of all things tech. So while I embraced email with the warmest hug when it emerged, I can see its appropriate place in this huge connected world now as much slimmer. We text. We Slack. We Zoom. We social media. We collaboratively author. We share files. We talk to voice assistants.
I almost drowned. While I want to take active credit for the shift in my attitude, I was also kind of forced into it. As I expanded in my career, the sheer volume of email, and the extent of what was requested in those emails, way outsized the time in the day I had to consume and action it. The quest for even close to a Zero Inbox became a bottomless pit that I could not scale as a single human being.
Today I am happy to report I have over 7k unread emails in my work email, and way more than that across several personal emails. I am lucky enough to have support for triaging urgent and critical messages in my work inbox; but, beyond that, I set up a few rules, indicated who my VIP contacts are, and I don’t feel one heart palpitation of stress. (Be warned: my LinkedIn inbox is approaching the same ratio of signal:noise as email, so it might be headed down the same path.)
The time I spend in email is now denser, high value time. I skim and scan for what matters, and I track people and threads of importance. I genuinely believe what is for you, will not pass you. If I miss something, and someone needs me, they will find a way to reach me, just as I have always accepted that I might need to reach out to someone more than once. Don’t feel bad if you miss something, or if it takes longer to reply than you would like, or if someone has to remind you, or if you have to remind someone else.
If you find yourself in the same Sisyphusian infinite email loop, it is probably time to start evaluating some new strategies. You can begin by setting up some rules to sort your mail, lengthening the amount of time before you check, turning off notifications or icon badges, timeboxing how long you will spend in any email session… only you knows what motivates you to keep refreshing that inbox.
To my daughter and her peers, mail is nothing more than a digital scrapbook, communication repository, and digital ID. It will take a while for anything other than email to be the communication tool of record in the workplace or for formal communications, but you can change your relationship with it anytime.
