inbox zero and the way of the declutterer
Like the rest of our lives, our email inbox can quickly become overwhelming. How we deal with that and all the other mountains of stuff is a critical skill.
Are you an email hoarder? If you are sitting there with 500, 5000, a million emails in your inbox ask yourself, “Why?”. It’s not really any different than the hoarder’s mentality that “I might need it someday”. Here’s what the Mayo Clinic has to say:
Signs and symptoms may include:
Excessively acquiring items that are not needed or for which there's no space
Persistent difficulty throwing out or parting with your things, regardless of actual value
Feeling a need to save these items, and being upset by the thought of discarding them
Building up of clutter to the point where rooms become unusable
Having a tendency toward indecisiveness, perfectionism, avoidance, procrastination, and problems with planning and organizing
— Mayo Clinic, Hoarding Disorder
I’m sure we all have a little of this in us: I can definitely relate to a few of them. Oddly we look at a person who hoards physical stuff as having a mental condition but it’s somehow “sure, that’s fine” when it comes to actively using an inbox that has 10’s of thousands of emails (or a desktop like the one below that threatens to leave me catatonic).
The nuclear option. Somewhere along the way I read about the nuclear option for an email inbox: summarily delete everything and start over. It appears to have come from this Ted blog entry. The assumption here - and it’s a good one - is that if there was something really important in there the sender will resend it.
In 1966 the Soviets extinguished a 3-year old oil fire in Uzbekistan with a 30 kiloton nuclear bomb. They didn’t have any other effective way to put it out.
The very best part of this option is that you could do it right now with almost no effort. Boom, worst part of the problem solved. This doesn’t represent a failure on the receiver’s part: if we can’t escape from our inbox what can we escape from? However, unlike the Soviet’s problem this fire will start again.
Get another storage unit. At one of my old jobs they refused to adopt any kind of chat system and email was used for almost all communications. Because it was useful to have a record of them I had a ‘backups’ folder and I would just create a new subfolder with the current date as the name, mark everything as read, and move it all out of the inbox and into that folder. Clean inbox, valuable stuff still there and searchable, no fuss, no muss. I call this the “Get a new storage unit” option because it works that way in the real world where we continue to hang on to stuff but at least we take the steps to store it somewhere else. It’s a good choice for those of you who just can’t bear to lose something. You’ll be fine until your provider wants more money to save your old emails.
Continuous decluttering. I don’t tend to let my email inbox get to a critical state like this but it can still get pretty messy if I leave it for more than a few days. Much of my time is spent online and there are myriad newsletters and product updates that I don’t want to completely unsubscribe from and my entry into the world of Substack has only increased the clutter in my inbox. And that’s just it: it’s clutter. It’s not really any different than the shopping bags that don’t find their way back to their storage spot, the yet-to-be filed paperwork on my desk, or the dishes that are “stored” in the drying rack.
Clutter (and her close cousins, Dust & Dirty Dishes) tend to drain my mental energy. Minette seems to have a much higher tolerance for Clutter (although not Dirty Dishes) and only has to clean off her desk every once and awhile.
Several times a week I completely empty my email inbox. Everything is gone: spam, promotions, personal, everything. Most are deleted without reading, some are read and deleted, some are read and filed in subfolders, but I am brutal. I’m also ready to roll out the big guns and take the nuclear option if things get bad.
Inbox zero as a metaphor for how we treat the accretion of stuff. Strong99 is about thriving longer in life and we can’t do that if we are constantly buried under a mountain of stuff. The additional firehose of information from the internet exacerbates the problem. Whether it’s your email inbox, your computer desktop, your garage, or your bedroom floor, they all represent areas where we are storing our overwhelm.
Stashed away somewhere after our move is a framed quote “The way you do one thing is the way you do everything”, meant as a reminder that both my good and bad habits translate to other parts of my life. It joins “Keep your nose clean” and “Keep it between the ditches” as advice to live by, the key here being that we’re continuing to keep something in a useful state. When things are bad enough just nuke it all, but then get into that habit of continuous decluttering.
How many messages are in your inbox right now?