Zero Inbox Wastes Time

How cluttered email can actually be more efficient

At this moment, I have 6809 messages in the inbox for my 9to5 job, and 4,202 of them are unread. The very idea makes my friend Heather shudder in horror. But I don’t miss important messages, I can generally find what I need, and I don’t waste time trying to clean up email.

If having 6,000 emails in your inbox would give you palpitations, you probably have a working system in place.

If, however, you lose things in your cluttered email or feel guilty for not living up to the Zero Inbox standard, I have a system that will help you feel more in control and allow you to let go of impossible perfectionism.

Sheer volume. I sampled my office email from the last semester and found that I have about 200 email threads updated daily. That doesn’t include the messages coming into Messy Desk Consulting or to the Gmail account I use for shopping and “free” downloads.

If I set a goal to read, process, delete, store, forward, or reply to every one of those messages, I could easily spend most days working with nothing but email, and I would be completing less than a third of my actual job.

AI isn’t doing it. Marketing floods our inboxes daily. In my personal accounts, I take advantage of Gmail’s AI features that sort Social, Updates, Forums, Promotions, and Spam, but those results aren’t consistent enough to do what I need at work. It simply isn’t acceptable for a message from the President of my college to show up in “forums” alongside true forums I use for professional development. For me, there is no point in having the filter if I need to check it daily to keep up with important mail.

You are supposed to be able to train the AI to sort as you prefer. Now, I may just be a bad trainer (my dog’s behavior would support that hypothesis), but I cannot seem to make Google remember what I tell it. Just when I get all the marketing separated from invoices, some update or slip of the mouse messes up the system.

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