Is Inbox Zero Possible? Does It Matter? | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | All right, Chris, moving on, Chris asks, Do you think there's a place for inbox zero in your

00:00:09.600 | productivity system? If yes, how do you manage to keep up with your inbox without spending hours on

00:00:15.840 | reading, classifying, answering mails, even if you only spend that time in specific time blocks?

00:00:21.280 | So I think Chris, yes. Inbox zero, by which I mean an inbox that on a regular basis goes down

00:00:29.520 | to having no messages in it, yes, is a good goal. And two, this should not require hours of reading,

00:00:38.240 | classifying and answering emails. Now, I don't mean to say it doesn't require that right now,

00:00:42.960 | I think for most people, the way they use their email, the way they use their inboxes,

00:00:47.040 | to get it down to zero would require hours of them going through this, it would be a Herculean task.

00:00:51.680 | But if you update and improve your relationship with this tool, getting down to inbox zero becomes

00:00:59.840 | much more tractable. And it's what you want to do. Because getting down to inbox zero means

00:01:04.240 | you have a pipeline of incoming and outcoming information that you're keeping up with.

00:01:08.800 | I mean, the only thing it means if your inbox is getting bigger and bigger, is that the pipeline

00:01:12.560 | of stuff coming in, you can't keep up with it, you don't have other systems for it.

00:01:15.680 | And you have this default spillover, let's just keep stuff in our inbox.

00:01:20.320 | So let me give you four things you can do, Chris. Four things you can do to improve your

00:01:26.560 | relationship with your inbox that will make inbox zero much more tractable.

00:01:31.840 | All right, number one, don't use email for back and forth conversation.

00:01:36.560 | Don't, I got to figure something out, we got to go back and forth about it. Don't do that with email

00:01:42.080 | that generates a huge amount of email, it's a huge pain. Back and forth conversation should

00:01:46.800 | be synchronous. There's a lot of ways to do this. There's office hours, there's calls,

00:01:51.360 | they're tacking on conversations to the end of pre existing meetings, however you want to do it.

00:01:56.560 | If it requires back and forth, you should be talking to a person, two minutes can accomplish

00:02:01.120 | what 20 back and forth emails would otherwise be required to do. Number two, don't store

00:02:06.880 | information in your inbox. This is a child's way of doing knowledge work information management,

00:02:12.240 | you're a grown up, you need something more sophisticated. You have to have places where

00:02:16.480 | you store relevant information, you have to have places where you keep track of what you're working

00:02:20.400 | on, what you're waiting for, and what you know about it. I personally recommend something like

00:02:24.880 | a Trello board, one for each of your different professional roles, where you can keep track of

00:02:30.160 | what's in progress, what you know about it, what you're waiting to hear back on.

00:02:34.640 | So if in one of your roles as a professor, you are the head of the faculty advisory committee,

00:02:42.640 | I say this from experience, I'm about to take on that role as the head of the faculty advisory

00:02:46.800 | committee in September, have a board for that. If there's things you're waiting to hear back from,

00:02:51.360 | you're trying to talk to your committee members about when to meet, or you're waiting to hear

00:02:55.280 | someone is taking a stab at writing up the report that you're going to bring to the faculty meeting,

00:02:59.360 | you should have a column in your Trello board for that role that says waiting to hear back from,

00:03:03.280 | and that's where those are, not an email in your inbox that you hope you just see and say,

00:03:07.520 | oh yeah, that's right, I'm waiting for someone to respond to that email. Let's say you're working

00:03:11.680 | on something in one of your roles, have a projects column and there's a card for it on your Trello

00:03:16.400 | board, and you're attaching the relevant files to it, and right at the top of the card, you say

00:03:20.560 | capital letters, status, colon, quick update on that status. You look at the board for that role,

00:03:25.760 | you get the whole just stalled to what's going on in five minutes. None of this needs to be in your

00:03:29.600 | inbox. So again, keeping track of what's going on in your inbox is a child's way of managing

00:03:36.240 | information. Be an adult, be more sophisticated. Three, use process-centric emails.

00:03:43.360 | Now I talked about this in a habit tune-up, I think Jesse would have to go back to the

00:03:48.720 | archives, but I think in the last couple of months, I did a habit tune-up on process-centric

00:03:55.600 | emails. There's probably a YouTube video on that at youtube.com/calendarformedia. But here's the

00:04:01.040 | brief summary. When you send an email to someone to initiate something that needs to get done,

00:04:06.880 | this meeting has to get set up, this client visit needs to be arranged.

00:04:11.520 | First, figure out the entire process for how you're going to get to completion. I will put up

00:04:16.880 | some ideas by this date, you will look at those ideas and mark the ones that work best. I'll then

00:04:22.720 | send a complete list once you've marked that on Wednesday morning to the client, and then I'll

00:04:27.120 | update you on our staff meeting on Friday, what we're going to do. Come up with the process for

00:04:31.520 | how you're going to get from here to completion and explain that process in the very first email

00:04:36.400 | you send about that obligation. Significantly reduces the number of back and forth messages

00:04:43.360 | that follow because you have a clear process about what you guys are going to do. Number four,

00:04:49.520 | things that are informational, newsletters, like my newsletter, calnewport.com,

00:04:56.160 | broadcast of deals, whatever it is that you get just informationally through your inbox where

00:05:02.240 | you never know which ones are going to be interesting, what won't, you might want to

00:05:04.800 | save things for a while to see if you want to read it, have a separate account for that.

00:05:08.400 | And if it's too late to have a separate account, then set up a filter

00:05:12.640 | to a separate label or folder, and you can update what gets filtered and treat that differently.

00:05:18.240 | Oh, here's my informational account. Here's my informational label or folder. And that's

00:05:22.400 | different. That's outside of your inbox, your worldview, because there's no stress

00:05:26.160 | captured by those messages. None of them make any demands of you or your time.

00:05:30.640 | It's a digital library for you to browse at your leisure. So separate that from the rest of your

00:05:36.480 | inbox. Then you can inbox zero what remains. All right, Chris, so there you go. The backstory

00:05:44.960 | on inbox zero. I wrote about this, that term in a piece I wrote a few years ago for the New Yorker

00:05:50.000 | called the rise and fall of getting things done. Merlin Mann, the productivity guru, Merlin Mann,

00:05:54.960 | it was his book contract to write a book titled Inbox Zero that essentially broke him and his

00:06:01.360 | interest in productivity. He struggled so philosophically about what's the point of

00:06:07.840 | getting super fiddly about processing emails in your inbox. It's actually what broke him.

00:06:12.000 | And he just couldn't write the book. He was on the contract, couldn't do it. And so it was like

00:06:15.440 | the Inbox Zero book was what broke. Inbox Zero broke Merlin Mann's productivity standing or

00:06:24.400 | interest. It was an interesting little tidbit from the history of productivity.

Is Inbox Zero Possible? Does It Matter? | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

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