After inbox zero

So I’m sitting here at a lab in the UNLV Lied Library, waiting for my advising appointment (which luckily got bumped up an hour — underpromise and overdeliver is definitely the way to go to make people happy). I’ll post about Vegas after I get back, though.

In the meantime, hmm…what to blog about? After doing so well with inbox zero, it’s rough going back to having 39 e-mails in my inbox and 440 unread items in Google Reader. I was doing so well! Monday or Tuesday I’ll get back into the groove, of course.

Or will I? Over the past few days before I left for Vegas, I got to wondering if inbox zero is all it’s made out to be. Yes, it was nice to be decluttered. Yes, it was nice to have nothing in my inbox. Yes, it helped me get stuff done on time.

But on the flip side, I was checking my e-mail a billion times a day. (Before that, it was only a million or two.) Obsessive is about the only word to describe it. It was too much.

And it takes a somewhat large investment of time each day to keep up with an inbox — an hour at the least. Maybe it’s worth it; maybe it’s not. I don’t know. It was constantly on my mind — it’s odd for emptiness to be so heavy — and did indeed feel like a bit of a burden.

And yet on the flip side of the flip side, it’s nice to be on top of things, and I really do love corresponding with people. And I didn’t have to worry that there were important e-mails five pages into Gmail that I’d forgotten about four weeks before.

I’m guessing there’s a beautiful balance somewhere in there, but I don’t really know where. I could say that I’ll reply to everything within a week, but that almost ends up being the same thing, but a week later. (Sure, it’s slightly different, but not by much.)

Or I could only reply to certain types of e-mails within that short time frame.

Or I could go Luddite and dwell incommunicado in the Andes.

Or…I don’t know. I’m leaning towards just sticking with inbox zero after all, since it is more polite, and training myself to only check e-mail a few times a day (and reply to it maybe twice a day), and just dealing with the burden. (Hold on. If I’m corresponding with any of you, I should say that by “burden” I don’t mean what you think I mean. :) It’s only as a mass that they become heavy. But I’m digging myself into a hole here. :P)

Anyway, I’m really tired — over and out.

Okay, here’s how I do this, Ben. I’ve kept Inbox Zero for a couple of weeks now, and I don’t feel like a slave to my email (well, I do, but that’s because of who I am, not my system).
First, I do email in a dash. Every 55 minutes, I’ll let myself look at my email. I don’t use Mail.app, or Thunderbird, or Gmail Notifier. I just open up the page, look around, delete anything worthy of deletion, archive anything that doesn’t produce an action (after labeling it of course), and the respond to whatever I feel like responding to. If I don’t respond right away, I mark it as unread, put the filter “@reply” on it, and archive it, getting it out of my way, but still visible on the sidebar.
Anyway, it works for me. YMMV, of course, but I think the emotional benefits of having a clear inbox (from 510 about a month ago) are wonderful.

I am all about the empty inbox - i try never to let it get above five emails and I leave it in the inbox until I’ve dealt with it.

Why don’t you just install Google Desktop? It notifies you when you get a new email, puts your Google Talk right there in the sidebar, and allows you to have your RSS feeds there nice and easy. I keep my Inbox at zero all the time because of it.

But, Marisa, do say “Oh, blinking light! New email!” and drop whatever you’re doing to go put out that fire? I think that if you have a high volume of email, it’s best to make a certain amount of time to deal with as much as you can, rather than responding immediately to every email coming in.

And, if I paid attention to what I wrote, I’d have noticed my typo. “do you say”

M: Sounds like a good plan. This weekend when I finally have some free time, I’m going to get back to Inbox Zero and try your system. My gut feeling is that it’ll work for me too (since we’re practically clones of each other :P), but we’ll see.

Janssen: It is really nice to have my inbox double as a to-do list — if I need to get something done, leaving it in my inbox ensures that I won’t forget about it. (Well, it does when I’m living the Inbox Zero lifestyle.)

Marisa: I have to agree with M — considering how much e-mail I get (and very few messages actually need to be responded to immediately), and considering how addicted I am to checking my e-mail as it is, I think it’s better to pull back and limit myself to set times. :)