What I cannot and will not understand is why you wouldn’t just delete an unread email you do not need. Obviously, everyone’s got some sentimental stuff from, like, 2014 at the back-end of the inbox, and that’s fine, as long as you’ve made the conscious decision to keep it. Only this time, it’s not for myself.įirst let me tell you why I believe “Inbox Zero” is the bare minimum, and a central inbox with, say, 50 or fewer read emails is the goal: if there is shit in your inbox that’s unread and more than a month old, you do not need it. This is the great digital purification challenge of our times? I feel akin to the way I felt when I learned what Next’s “Too Close” was really about some four or five years after its release: embarrassed.
There can be hundreds and thousands of emails in there, so long as they have all been marked “read.” This realization came to me months ago, at least, and I am still stunned, and a little annoyed. Imagine my surprise when I learned that when most people refer to “ Inbox Zero,” they don’t mean a literally empty inbox, but rather, one in which there are zero unread emails. While this appears to be one definition of Inbox Zero, it’s also not the more popular one. I didn’t get the appeal - if there were no emails in my inbox, what would I look at every time I clicked over to my email tab? Blank space? I like having something there, and think of it as the space in which I prioritize my various to-do tasks. (Please hold your applause.) A few years ago, or whenever it was that people started talking about “Inbox Zero,” I was under the impression that they were referring to an inbox with literally zero emails in it. Photo: Yuri Arcurs Productions/Getty ImagesĪs of this writing, I have five emails in my main personal inbox, and 13 in my main work inbox.