‘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.

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.