Inbox Zero People
I used to think there were two kinds of people in the world: Inbox zero people, and people who don’t mind the notifications piling up. Inbox zero people are the ones who need to end their day with every email read and every notification acknowledged. I pictured the non-inbox zero people always on the other extreme. Hundreds or thousands of little red circles, screaming for attention on the other side of soundproof walls.
I like when things are organized. I’m a list person, and I like completing all the things I put on my to-do lists. If I had to categorize myself from the outside looking in, I’d probably think that I’d be an inbox zero person. Maybe not every single day, but definitely by the end of the week. Until a year or two ago, I would have thought I was that person too. But it turns out, I’m not.
Our attention can only be focused on one thing at a time. And I prefer my attention dialed in on whatever task is at hand. It’s why my phone is always on silent and rarely in my pocket. And why nearly all my notifications are muted. It’s why of the few apps I have, over half of them are only accessible over WiFi. Because it’s easy to let the interruptions shift your focus, if and when you decide to let them in.
But email is different. Email is part of my job. And as much as it can annoy me, I am at my core, an overachiever. I was that kid in school that never missed a homework assignment or a deadline. I might have been late to class sometimes, or often if it was first period. But I was also turning in the extra credit assignment simply because it had sounded fun.
I didn’t need to be the best. I still don’t. It’s never been about how I stack up in comparison to other people. It’s that I have very high expectations for myself. Not every assignment had to be perfect. But I could never just give it half the effort. Plus, I liked and respected my teachers. They were putting in the effort, so I always felt I should too. I still feel that way. Effort deserves respect and focused attention.
I masquerade as an inbox zero person for my personal email account. But that’s very easy to keep up with. If I get 40 new messages and don’t check it for a few days, it only takes a minute or two to catch up. I just delete, delete, unsubscribe, read one, delete another. I send maybe three emails a month in my personal life, so I don’t get many I need to read in reply.
But my work email is a completely different story. That’s where I’m tested daily and I’ve settled into my true nature. Until the past year, I’ve never had a job that was so dependent on virtual communication. Until this past year, I still believed in inbox zero at least twice a week. I still believed that was me. It was so much simpler to believe when I received less email.
These days though, I know I’m different. I am far from an inbox zero person, and I’m more than okay with that. If I tried to be, I don’t know that I’d ever close my laptop or sleep, and I think the quality of my work would suffer. There are other things I need to do with my attention and my time. There are other ways to get ahold of me. And if it was urgent, you hopefully wouldn’t have sent it in an email.
If I spend a few hours during the work day with my browser closed to focus on a project, the new unread messages will fill the entire screen when I check back in. It’s been at least eight months since I closed out of my email without a single one still highlighted, waiting for my attention. It took a few weeks to get used to this reality, but now I know I’ll never go back.
Most of the time, the oldest unread email in my inbox is from the last ten days. My comfort zone is somewhere between 25 and 68 unread messages. Less or more than that, I start to get overwhelmed. On a really good week, I get within three days of being current. On a really bad week, I’ll probably fall an extra week behind. I’ll get back to my zone though. I always do.
My default and genuine first line is often some version of thank you for your patience while waiting for me to reply. It might take me more than a week to read your email. But it will have my full attention when I finally do. I’d rather be slow to respond than rush through reading it to clear the notification, and forget to reply. I’d rather be later than you expected than someone who never showed up.
There was a day last month where I could have done it. Gotten to inbox zero for the first and only time in over six months. But I couldn’t bring myself to open the last one. I didn’t know if I could risk going back without believing it was maybe sustainable. So I left one email unread, closed out of my inbox, and spent the next month working back to my comfort zone.
Author’s note: One of my goals this year is to find my way back to consistency on this little blog of mine. Back to publishing something new every Tuesday. That didn’t happen how I pictured it would this first month of this new year. So instead, please enjoy this third of four days in a row of resolution(ish)-themed content to close out January. I hope to greet you again with consistency, beginning on February 7th.
