There’s nothing like the feeling of seeing your inbox reach zero at the end of a long day, messages archived, every request dealt with, no impending doom that you’ve forgotten a vital response that could cost you your entire career. At least, we imagine there’s nothing like it, we wouldn’t know, because we’re too busy silently resenting our colleagues who reach inbox zero to actually reach it ourselves.
However, it turns out that inbox zero may not be the beacon of productivity we’re led to believe. In fact, the case for has inbox infinity has been made online, after an American journalist at The Atlantic wrote about the endless cycle of emails making complete inbox tranquillity impossible.
‘There is simply no way for anyone with a full-time job and multiple inboxes to keep up with the current email climate,’ Taylor Lorenz wrote, ‘Even after deleting and sorting my 2,700 unread messages, I awoke the next day to more than 400 more.’
While not all of us are waking up to hundreds of emails, it’s true that the mission to delete or archive absolutely every email we receive feels like a momentous task that ultimately never-ends. Emails will always keep coming, so does it really matter that there’s a bunch leftover that we leave for the next day? Ultimately, unless your job directly impacts the life and death of others, will leaving some emails for 12 hours ever be that catastrophic?
Logically, the answer is no, but for the devotees of inbox zero, it’s just about the anxiety of having unanswered emails, it’s the feeling of productivity at the end of a working day when that little balloon appears in Outlook and you’re quite literally done for the day. But does answering, or at least archiving, all of your emails make you a more productive person? According to Moyra Scott, productivity expert, ‘it is always worth spending less time on pointless emails’, but she too is a proponent of inbox zero.
‘Inbox Zero does not mean “getting through all your email”, which for many people is a ridiculous and overwhelming idea,’ she told Grazia, ‘"Inbox Zero" is about having a quick, easy - and possibly ruthless - sorting process in place. So that when you come back to your inbox, you know exactly what you really need to look at without having to hunt it down in a huge pile of emails, getting distracted on the way
For Moyra, who coaches productivity workshops across London and Brighton, it’s important to change our mindset around email and treat them a lot more literally. ‘Imagine if emails were real letters constantly coming in through the letter box,’ she says, ‘You could stand by the letter box opening them as you go, flagging things to come back to as you go, but leave them in a big pile, or you could have a system of in-trays, sorting them out. It’s like that really.’
However, this doesn’t mean creating an endless filing system, pointlessly filing every email you get. ‘Sprawling filing trees are a total waste of time,’ she says. What it does mean though, it putting everything into useful folders you can go back to later.
Stating that she can get her clients to ‘inbox zero’ in around two hours, her advice is to put everything older than two weeks into one folder, and sort the rest. ‘Very rarely does anyone ever need to go into that folder,’ she states.
‘If you maintain Inbox Zero, you know exactly how many emails are new and unread and you can quickly get rid of the rubbish,’ she continues, ‘and sort what is left into folders that are useful to you.’
So that’s it then, apparently the inbox zero devotees really were onto something after all. Goodbye ‘inbox infinity’, it was nice to dream our endless inbox actually made us more productive than our super organised friends for a second there.