I think you can get so wound up in this one thing you’re supposed to be feeling bad about that you lose a lot of opportunities.
It’s January 2011 and Merlin Mann has a deadline. This is him on episode one of the Back to Work podcast. That show petered out last year when his co-host apparently stopped talking to him, but this first episode is so bright and full of potential.
But Merlin has a deadline for a book about managing email. It has an ISBN and a subtitle and an author bio and a contract… and an editor.
A month later he flies to New Zealand to give the closing talk at a technology conference. He talks about fear, more specifically, being “scared shitless”. He talks emotionally about his dad, and his divorce. He’s cocky, charismatic and comical, but it was all kind of put together at the last minute. Because he has this deadline.
Two months later he writes about his young daughter, and how travel and work are getting in the way of more memories being created between them. Turns out, this deadline was months ago, and Merlin still hasn’t delivered his book about email.
He still hasn’t.
Nowadays, you can look up “Inbox Zero”, the method he introduced to the world in 2007, and you could dive down a whole rabbit hole without ever coming across Merlin Mann. Today, we’re going to talk about Inbox Zero – it’s actually a pretty good way of organising your email – but behind the system is a dude who stepped off the hamster wheel of productivity, got some perspective, and became one of the Internet’s true treasures.
Before we crack on and talk about email, I want to make the point that Merlin Mann is very much a thriving personality on the web. He hasn’t slinked away to lick any imaginary wounds; he has about a million different podcasts and blogs, and if he ever hears this episode, he won’t thank me for it. Not many people like to be seen in the way this particular show sees people. I, for one, can relate.
Merlin Mann has had a lot of jobs. And yeah, OK, if it’s the first time you’ve heard his name, yes it’s Merlin like the magician, because the name is Welsh, and incidentally, King Arthur is Welsh mythology. So I think it has less to do with the wizard, and more to do with the country.
I can’t imagine you grow up normal when your name is Merlin, but this isn’t the nominative determinism podcast, so I’ll leave such idle speculation to a show with a bigger budget.
So I was telling you about Merlins’s jobs. Over the years he’s been a musician, a front-end coder, a blogger, a keynote speaker, and a podcaster.
From 43 Folders to Google
In 2004 Mann started a blog called 43 Folders, where he wrote about the stuff we now probably put into the bucket of “productivity”. Over the years he’d write more about email, and in the summer of 2007 he was asked to deliver a talk at Google, who were so buried in email that it was stopping them from getting their real work done.
Inbox Zero became, as patron saint of the podcast Oliver Burkeman described it, “the Atkins diet for nerds”. And incidentally, if you’re playing the Undo drinking game, I just invoked Burkeman’s name so you have to empty your glass.
Suffice it to say the idea exploded. The New York Post called it part of a wave of minimalism that sprang up about a decade ago; you know, the whole “joy of missing out”, “life changing power of tidying up” or whatever. That’s probably why I really like snooker; as the comedian Jon Richardson put it, it’s essentially just tidying up turned into a pub game.
The point of Inbox Zero is to make email as small a part of your life as possible, to treat it a little like sewerage: clear the backlog and then keep pumping it away from you as fast and efficiently as possible. That’s my definition, and the email community is welcome to it.
So, how does it work? Well, the first thing we need to do is clear our inbox. There’s no time like the present, so let’s start now.
The email DMZ
Create a new folder and give it a name like “DMZ” (or “DMZee” if you prefer), and drag everything from your inbox into that folder. If you’re super brave, open that folder and archive anything older than 21 days. Chances are, if it’s important to someone else, someone’s going to badger you about it later. And if it’s important to you, it should live somewhere outside of your inbox.
Don’t worry, we’ll come back to that folder in due course.
Now, if you’re too young or attractive to have played those point-and-click adventure games like Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle, you have my sympathies. But if you were around in the 90s, maybe you played one or two of those games. If so, this idea will be familiar to you.
You have an object, like a bowling ball, and you have a number of things you can do with or to that ball. These are usually things like pick up, put down, push, pull, or what have you. Inbox Zero essentially takes a point-and-click adventure game approach to email.
The Inbox Zero method
Whenever a new message lands in your inbox, you’ll take one of five actions:
- Throw it away
- Delegate it to someone else
- Respond now
- Defer it til later
- Take action on it.
1. Throw it away
This is pretty simple. I’m probably a bit of an email hoarder, but I draw the line at receipts for repeat purchases, support tickets, calendar invites and the like. They live elsewhere on the Internet, so being anywhere in your email system adds no value and just eats into your storage quota. If you know you don’t need it, delete it.
Now Gmail has an action called Archive. Just like Delete, it gets the message out of your way, but unlike Delete, archived items don’t self-destruct after 30 days. If you’re sure you’re going to need that new email that’s come in, archive it. Otherwise, bin it.
And what is archiving? Archiving, for me, is a single folder. It’s a single folder called archive. It’s not 24 folders, friend. It’s not coming up with the most crazy Byzantine taxonomically complete system that you can think of, because be honest.
For those of you who do have the 24 folder Byzantine system, when’s the last time you used it to actually find anything? Maybe you do. Maybe you use it all the time. You, sir, will win a prize.
But for most of you, I’ve seen you. You sit there and you go, wha? Is this– this is going to be definitely 2007, July, blog related – is it blog related or CMS? Really, it’s more like my Ruby ultimate golf group. Really, it should go here. But I’ll tag it and duplicate it.
Dude, it’s the modern age. You got the freaking Gmail. Search for it. Flag it. If you need to flag it and put it into a folder, that’s great. But ask yourself– and I will grant you. Some of you need this structure because you’re crazy….
I’m on a Mac. I grab an email and I start dragging it. I have to start thinking now. Where does this go? For an email that I’m going to archive, I got to think about where it goes. I’m not a librarian. I have a blog. Like, it all goes into archive.
Ask yourself, what is the minimally Byzantine system that you can tolerate that will still allow you to find stuff later on? does not need to be taxonomically satisfying. It needs to be easy to find.
Not gonna lie, I feel, as the kids say, seen. I’ve historically been a serial organiser of emails, with lots of lovely nested folders. But Merlin’s right; if there’s anything you really need, you can search your archive for it.
Plus, the important thing to remember here is email isn’t the thing; it’s just a record of the thing. It’s not the appointment you need to keep, or the new logo design you have to approve, or the master of the track you’re collaborating on… it’s just the envelope that thing came in.
Speaking of envelopes, an erstwhile colleague of mine used to talk about how Word documents were basically the envelopes of the Internet. Most people, it turns out, don’t know how to send screenshots or logos to people, so they put them inside Word documents – because they know how they work – and send those Word docs over email.
People should really be taught how to use computers. Anyway, the point is, delete your emails. At least the ones you definitely don’t need.
2. Delegate
If you don’t have all the stuff you need to act on a new email that’s come in, who does? Get it off your plate as soon as possible and onto someone else’s. But don’t be a dick about it, and don’t toss emails back and forth like a hot potato.
Cal Newport, the Deep Work guy makes the point that it’s a lot quicker to have a synchronous conversation with someone, but we seem so rarely up for that. Honestly, think of the number of awkward and spiky email exchanges you’ve had with people that would be so much smoother if you’d just picked up the phone, spoken for two minutes and gone “Oh shit, that’s what you mean? Oh cool, yeah, I can do that”.
The ruthless version of this tactic is: if you can make this email someone else’s problem, do that. As long as you’re not just delaying the inevitable. Some people will just bat an email back and ask for more clarification simply so they can get the thing off their desk. Don’t be that person, but similarly don’t be afraid to throw it to someone else if they can help you clear a blockage.
The third thing you can do with an email lis… respond. And here I have to applaud Merlin Mann for not trying to come up with another D word just so he had a funky nemonic. If there’s one thing Merlin has never considered himself, it’s a thought leader, and crowbarring in a particular word so it fits a nemonic is prime thought leader bullshit.
Anyway, if you can reply to a message in a couple of minutes, do so now. This is straight out of Getting Things Done by David Allen, and you better believe it’s gonna be the subject of a future episode. I know what I’m about, son.
There’s a neat little idea that can help with this, too. You’ll never believe this, listener, but I have something of a reputation for being somewhat verbose… and that absolutely extends to my email.
But along with the prior art of David Allan’s GTD framework, Merlin also cites a teeny idea called 5 Sentences, which is a commitment to replying to emails in five sentences or fewer. I reckon it’s worth a try, and I suspect the Universe will thank you.
3. Deal with it now
Whether you’re a digital GTD fanatic, a time blocker, or a daily pen-and-paper person, hopefully you’ve got a way of tracking the stuff you’re supposed to be doing and roughly when.
When an email lands in your inbox that needs you to do a particular thing, if that thing will take you less than 5 minutes, do it now, reply to the email if you need to, and yeet that email into the sea.
4. Deal with it later
If it’s going to take longer, stick it on your todo list. If you use an app to keep track of your tasks, you can copy the link to the email in Gmail, and paste it in the notes field of your task. That way you don’t have to search for it later.
That’s essentially the system: delete, delegate, reply, defer, or do. Which is all well and good for new emails, but what about that DMZ folder? Well, that’s where you might want to pour yourself a nice stiff drink and dive in. Let’s do that after this brief interruption.
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So you know how to deal with new messages as they come in, but what about that DMZ folder you setup? Well, you want to do the same thing there, which is why it’s probably a good idea to archive anything older than a month, unless you’re able to give everything a quick cursory glance to check it’s not going to catch on fire if you don’t reply.
Back in the day there used to be a podcast called Reply All, which cottoned on to a pre-existing idea of the “email debt forgiveness day”. Declaring email bankruptcy might get you in trouble at work, but, I mean, no-one’s gonna know if you don’t tell ‘em. Who’s to say you didn’t have some sort of major tech issue the day Janet sent that email she wants to bump back to the top of your inbox? Just sayin’.
Like I said earlier, this methodology exploded and gained almost cult-like status. And because I guess Merlin isn’t the type to stick a trademark symbol on everything he creates, you can now buy books like 21 Days to Inbox Zero that are based on this method, but are written by other people. One assumes they kick back some royalties to him, no? Hmm.
Well, that aside, Inbox Zero has become such a facet of email culture that lots of apps do a little celebratory dance when you clear your inbox. My desktop email app even has a little burst of confetti, and proudly proclaims “Inbox zero” in large, friendly letters.
But not everyone thought it was a neat idea, and some question whether it’s even a healthy idea, let alone a workable one.
Inbox Zero is “BS”
Studies show that it takes an undue amount of time to return to whatever you were doing when you take time out to read some – usually unnecessary and unsolicited email, delete it and redirect your mind to where it was before.
One study, cited in a story about how some of us may just be more attached to our techno-identities than others, quoted a researcher who studied distraction and email.
When someone drops everything just to get an unread count back to zero, productivity might be taking a hit. “It takes people on average about 25 minutes to reorient back to a task when they get interrupted”, [a researcher] says.
This comes from Sara Stewart’s takedown of the Inbox Zero method. In fact, she calls it bullshit. It’s a little performative, but she does make the point I made a little earlier, that if you’ve deleted something important, someone is going to follow up. So really, why do we need a system?
Well, and this is me editorialising here, why do we need anything, y’know? Some people like to know they’ve got a handle on their correspondence. Some take that obligation more seriously than others, and some get buried by it. I don’t know if you remember but around the time Merlin was flogging his Inbox Zero method, Ringo Starr was quitting fan mail.
And the thing is, Merlin himself has admitted it’s pretty tricky to really get on top of your email. He describes it as a people problem, not a tech problem, “and you can’t fix people”… which kind of underscores a point I made a couple of weeks ago. Sure, we can implement systems, but we’re chaotic, organic beings filled with bacteria that wriggle around and move unpredictably. Some days you’re smashing through tasks like a demon, and other days you just want to sit on the sofa and listen to the audiobook of The Martian. It’s really good, by the way, I highly recommend it… both the sofa and the book.
Cranking
The penultimate post on Merlin’s 43 Folders blog is heartbreaking. I wasn’t in Merlin’s head at the time but, given the final post was just a recommendation of a friend’s app, I could smell the acrid stench of burnout.
Cal Newport said that writing the book on Inbox Zero – a book that was commissioned and has an ISBN, but which never materialised – “broke” Mann and his relationship to productivity. I don’t know about that, but I do know the meta world of Inbox Zero isn’t as neat and tidy as others, because it was made by a human, and humans are messy.
In conclusion
Productivity isn’t the destination or even the boat that gets us there. It’s the mechanism inside the motor that powers the boat. If we’re just using the boat to get somewhere and we spend all our time fiddling with the motor, we lose sight of where we’re going, and maybe even why we’re going there in the first place. And if you’re not careful, you take yourself wildly off course.
Productivity is about people; the time we spend with them, and the things we can make when we learn from or collaborate with them. On that note, I’ll give the last word to Merlin.
You know, you sit around and you go “Oh, I hope people like me, and I hope they friend me, and I hope they do all this superficial stuff that doesn’t cost anything”. But what you really want is to not suck enough the people you really admire wouldn’t mind doing something with you.
And if that sounds like nonsense, then just change the channel in your mom’s basement, because that’s the thing. The whole thing is getting to where even – I’m not saying you’ve got to go work with George Clooney or something (which I would really enjoy) – but just getting the opportunity to have yourself and your work improved by proximity to people who are better at what you do.