I'd like to begin this with an apology. If you sent me an email in the past four years or so and I didn't respond, I'm sorry. It's not that your message wasn't important to me. It's just that I didn't read it. Or else I did read it but then I clicked "Mark Unread" to trick myself into thinking I didn't read it.In fact, the more important your message, the more likely it is I handled it it this way. I wanted to give your email the thoughtful response it deserved, so I set it aside to deal with later. Then later became never.
I am a procrastinator. That's why I'm writing a post about my New Year's resolution on January 4th. It's also why I have, at last count, more than 9,800 unopened emails in my Gmail inbox, as you can see from the screengrab at the top of this post. Not 9,800 emails total, mind you. That number is closer to 30,000. That 9,800 is just the unopened ones. Even people who think of themselves as email hoarders gasp when they see that number.
Like many people, I'm in the bad habit of using my inbox as a to-do list. If your email requires me to take some sort of decision and I don't feel like doing that right now, I'll mark it unread in the hope that Future Jeff will possess a greater sense of urgency. It never happens that way. Usually, Future Jeff's eyes automatically skip over the already-familiar subject line until it rolls all the way down to the bottom of the page. Once it's onto page two, forget about it. (There are still 568 pages to go, by the way.)
Do I have excuses? Of course I do. At some point around 2009, I made the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time decision to use my personal Gmail account as my main address for work. I did this because I changed jobs several times in a short span and got sick of sending out those change-of-contact-info mass mailings, and also because Gmail's massive storage capacity meant I'd never again need to go looking for a suddenly important old message only to learn it had been deleted from the corporate server.
I don't have those problems anymore. What I do have are dozens of daily press releases, PR pitches, newsletters, invitations and other clutter to deal with. That's on top of the usual messages from friends and family, social media notifications, sale offers from retailers, mailing list updates, etc.
Why don't I just delete this stuff as it comes in? Different reasons. I am, to be sure, a bit of a hoarder. Maybe someday I'll write my memoirs, right? And I suffer from that special kind of laziness that comes from letting a problem fester until dealing with it becomes unthinkable. One "30% Off PLUS Free Shipping!" email is no problem. Three hundred? Eh, I'll tackle it this weekend. Or next weekend.
It's pathetic. I am a 35-year-old man who is afraid of my email. I go through life in a state of constant low-level panic, worried that I'm forgetting something important but scared of wading into my inbox and looking for it because I know all too well what awaits me there.
This is no way to live. So, as of today, I'm not going to live this way anymore. I'm going Inbox Zero. The minute after I publish this post, I'm going to select all 28,487 messages in my inbox and archive them. Thereafter, I pledge that, at least once a day, I will clear my inbox of everything.
In preparation for this, I've already started building out a taxonomy of folders and filters for the types of emails I receive most frequently. I'm going to try very hard to actually use all these folders and filters and not just archive everything in one big undifferentiated mess that just becomes a surrogate inbox. I'm going to unsubscribe from just about everything, especially the stuff I don't remember subscribing to in the first place. I'm not hewing exactly to the official Inbox Zero program authored by Merlin Mann, but close enough.
This won't be easy. Dealing with things in a systematic way has never been a strength of mine. Yesterday, I told my boss, Dan Bigman, that I was going to go Inbox Zero and believed it would help me to become a more organized and efficient person. Dan took a look around my almost pathologically cluttered cubicle, predicted I would fail hard and walked away laughing.
He might be right. I may be beyond salvation. But when I've made New Year's resolutions in the past, I've usually managed to stick to them at least for a while. In any case, I'll be back with an update in a few days to let you know how it's going. Inbox Zero, here I come.
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