And How To Overcome It

Iz: The state of being at Inbox Zero.

It all started when Mailbox was released for iOS. The app motivated me to keep my inbox empty, it had fluid swipes which let me rip through emails, pushing them off the inbox and ultimately reaching my inbox’s state of zen — The Iz, which eventually became my state of zen.

It worked very well, it made me happy. It brought about this sense of satisfaction in seeing an empty inbox, a sense of completeness, an accomplishment of being done with your tasks. Since then, no matter what email client I used, Mailbox had brought about this habit in me, of attending to emails and deciding what I needed to do with them.

This is all fine and dandy. Until it isn’t.

This need to have your inbox at zero could get overwhelming eventually. It would take over you. It would make sure there is this constant thought in your mind that would keep nudging you to take care of the email you received last; in order to see that zero inbox again.

The need to keep your inbox at zero is insatiable, it’s a constant endeavor needing constant effort and attention. You need to make quick decisions and swipe the emails away in the right directions so they could be archived for eternity or be reminded of at some other point in time.

Why do we want a constant state of Inbox-Zero?

I believe we want that because emails are annoying and when you get the impression of being done with them, it makes you feel good. Nobody enjoys emails. It’s a chore, it’s tedious and a burden. And getting done with a burden generally makes a lot of people happy.

Inbox Zero offers that gratification but, it’s a pitfall. Emails never get over, there’s a continuous stream of emails coming your way whether your inbox is zero or not. What your Inbox-Zero-OCD does is make you want to react to every email you receive. That, my dear reader, is the problem with Inbox Zero.

The Problem

Inbox Zero needs too much of your attention and that decreases your overall productivity.

Inbox Zero needs you to take a call on every email in your inbox. You need to decide if you want to reply, forward, archive, move to a folder, delete or ask to be reminded of it later. Without deciding this for every email, you aren’t rewarded with the state of being Iz. In order to attain Iz, you start replying to and archiving emails but, for those pesky emails that you can’t take action on at that moment, you ask your client to remind you of them later. This makes your client alert you twice, if not more, for every email you dismiss for later, every time pulling you into the magic of being at Iz by distracting you from whatever else you’re doing.

Ultimately, Inbox Zero makes you extremely productive at handling emails that your productivity in other things takes a hit. Surely, if your only job in the world is to handle emails, Inbox Zero is a boon to you. But, for the many of us to whom it isn’t, it’s nasty.

So, what now?

Since I started striving to be in a state of Iz, there have been brief periods of time when I have slipped and let my inbox bloat up. This has happened when I’ve been sick, travelling and when I quit my job and took some time off everything. I’ve always gotten back to maintaining the state of Iz, until recently.

Ever since Mailbox was unplugged by Dropbox, I had been on the lookout for a worthy replacement. About 1.5 years ago I started using CloudMagic (currently called Newton) as my email client. I liked how simple and elegant the UI was. Back then, most email clients offered quite a bad experience to me. They often got in the way of me using the application and got me even more annoyed than I usually am doing emails. CloudMagic managed to stay out of my way and, in some ways, was able to improve my efficiency in doing emails by having smart and nifty features at the right places throughout the application.

The thing with CloudMagic was that it didn’t constantly nudge the user to attain the state of Iz. It wasn’t designed for that. It was a very simple, bare-minimum email client that didn’t have strong opinions. It let you manage emails however you saw fit.

That’s when my interest in attaining Iz started depleting.

The Solution

In the last year or so, I have slowly let myself be okay with having a bulky inbox. I started doing emails only twice or thrice everyday. I let the content of the emails dictate how much time I spend doing emails than the need to have an empty inbox dictate that.

I still do a little bit of managing on my inbox. I archive emails and use the remind-me-later option. I move my important emails to folders and use labels in gmail. But, I’m okay having a lot of my emails in my inbox.

My productivity has increased a lot because of this. My attention is not constantly required by Iz and I have longer, distraction-free periods of time to concentrate on other work.

tl;dr

  • Inbox Zero (Iz) needs a lot of attention.

  • Productivity in other things decreases because of the need to attain Iz.

  • Prioritize the content in an email over the tidiness of your inbox to dictate how much interaction you want to have with an email to break out of the bane of the Iz.

  • Enjoy increased productivity.

The Mantra

Content of an email > Tidy inbox