Inbox Zero, the policy of making sure you’ve acted on, delegated or deleted all your email, has become something of a productivity holy grail since Merlin Mann gave his famous talk about it at Google a few years ago. I personally love Inbox Zero, but some people are skeptical about an empty inbox as the ultimate goal.
Brittany Ancell at The 99% recently decided to forsake Inbox Zero and start checking email only twice a day. Her reasoning was that “we feel a sense of accomplishment in tending to a constant stream of incoming (but not very important) requests. It’s the Inbox Hero Mentality: ‘I may not be making any headway on my to-do list, but I’ll be damned if there’s one message lying in wait!’”
Instead of operating with a reactionary workflow, based on responding to whatever hit her inbox, she decided to deal with email on her own schedule. The thing is, I don’t think this “balanced email diet” is antithetical to Inbox Zero. Brittany still zeroed her inbox every morning, dealing with anything actionable and deleting the rest. I think Merlin Mann would agree with her that it’s important to build a system that turns your actionable email into … well, action.
It will be interesting to see how productivity nerds respond to Merlin’s upcoming Inbox Zero book. I think the book will go a long way toward clarifying that Inbox Zero doesn’t mean actively processing email all day as if it were your only job. Inbox Zero is supposed to make your email less distracting, not more distracting. If that means you only check email twice a day, so be it.
Jay is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA. He blogs about software for Download Squad and contributes interviews to The Morning News, among others. You can also find him on Twitter.
