Title of this post shamelessly stolen from @corbden@defcon.social
Keeping email closed is one of the greatest life hacks in existence. Every time I close my email at the end of the day and sit down at my computer the next morning without a full inbox staring me in the face is a better day than the reverse. I do this about 1% of the time.
One thing preventing me from accomplishing this ridiculously simple behavioral change is some weird inability to close the email tab if there are emails still in there to process. I realized this today because last night I did get to inbox zero and closed the tab, leaving my brain with shockingly amble space to consider my day this morning.
I got to inbox zero by liberal use of the “snooze” functionality in my email client. I do this every so often, although I’m almost always a little sad when those emails reappear in my inbox on their specified day.
I often fail to get to inbox zero because many of those emails represent tasks I do need to accomplish, but they are too small – or too complex – to capture in my task manager of choice. I already have too many places I capture tasks (link), you would think I would resist yet another, but there it is, the proverbial task list anyone can add to, uninvited (link). All emails are tasks if you think about it, almost always the most unpleasant of tasks – or, rarely, a wonderful rabbit hole of intellectual stimulation, one that I will feel guilty about pursuing when my goal was to crank through this damned list as quickly as possible.
Email inboxes personify the worst of our modern world, and modern knowledge work. A wonderful, open, decentralized protocol originally enjoyed by a few to communicate asynchronously over long distances, now a curse, a punishing stick imposed by capitalist land owners on their serfs to keep them busy, even if that work isn’t actually planting seeds but just implementing yet another new irrigation system sold to the baron by yet another traveling salesman.