‘Inbox zero’ is a lie we should all give up on

Do you remember work before email? For anyone under 45 that’s a resounding “no way!” but if you’re in the second half of your career, I’m sure you can recall how work was done before email took over. It was on the phone and in person, using paper and pens, mail and faxes, and at a pace that you had some control over.

Then came the 1990s and the popularisation of individual email addresses at work (not to mention personal Hotmail addresses with the most random combination of words you could possibly think of). This was a time when email was imbued with naive possibilities before it morphed into what it is today: the scourge of the modern workplace.

Too many of us confuse constantly checking emails with being productive at work.Credit: Peter Riches

Yes, of course, email is extremely efficient as a communication form, but we now spend way too much of our workday using our inbox as a default homepage while a never-ending stream of messages fills up our time and headspace.

It’s been estimated that the average white-collar worker receives about 120 emails a day, or about 600 every week. Researchers from the University of California, Irvine, showed that every time we’re distracted by an interruption at work – such as the ping of a new email – it can take, on average, at least 20 minutes to regain our focus. What a deadly combination for attention spans.

Alongside the rise of email came a curious new term: “inbox zero”. If you’re not familiar with it, this means finding the time to go through all the emails you are sent so you can respond to, file or delete every message until you temporarily get your inbox folder down to zero.

Inbox zero is positioned as a magical destination that only the most enlightened of us will ever arrive at. Some people swear by it – and good on you – but for the rest of us mere mortals, I’m here to absolve you of the guilt you feel when you fire up your computer: inbox zero is a lie, and we should give up on trying to achieve it.

We now spend way too much of our workday using our inbox as a default homepage while a never-ending stream of messages fills up our time and headspace.

I tried valiantly for years to attain this revered status. Each day hundreds of fresh messages would demand my attention, and when I wasn’t pulled into meetings or doing actual work, I’d scan them for any live bombs I needed to address right away. Then I’d spend a few hours at the end of each day trying to drain the constant well of emails that just keep refilling. Sound familiar?

Once I realised it was actually impossible – physically and mentally – to stay on top of my overflowing inbox, I graduated into a kind of zen state about it. If something was really that urgent, I reasoned, it would eventually boomerang back. And with the same work email address for over 15 years, the only zeroes in my inbox were the ones tallying the tens of thousands of emails I kept accumulating. And I was OK with that.

There once was a practical need to clear your inbox and file emails into neat folders, mainly due to clunky mail programs that couldn’t handle large storage (Lotus Notes, anyone?). But now that most of our mail is monopolised by mega-companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft, one of the benefits of their scale is reliable cloud storage and fast search that negates that need.

Too many of us confuse constantly checking emails with being productive at work. It’s not. Your inbox is a list of things that other people want you to do, and you can easily get lost in their priorities if you haven’t clearly defined your own.

So if you’re someone who feels a twang of guilt every time you open your inbox and are confronted by an ever-increasing number of emails screaming for your attention, this is your sign to let it all go.

Instead, take a deep breath, shut down your mail program and grab the nearest pen. Start your own short list of what you need to get done, undistracted by the needs of everyone else around you. Mark them off, one at a time, until there are zero tasks left. That’s how simple work was before email took over, and there’s a good argument we need to get back there.

Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com.

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