All right, Chris, moving on, Chris asks, Do you think there's a place for inbox zero in your productivity system? If yes, how do you manage to keep up with your inbox without spending hours on reading, classifying, answering mails, even if you only spend that time in specific time blocks?

So I think Chris, yes. Inbox zero, by which I mean an inbox that on a regular basis goes down to having no messages in it, yes, is a good goal. And two, this should not require hours of reading, classifying and answering emails. Now, I don't mean to say it doesn't require that right now, I think for most people, the way they use their email, the way they use their inboxes, to get it down to zero would require hours of them going through this, it would be a Herculean task.

But if you update and improve your relationship with this tool, getting down to inbox zero becomes much more tractable. And it's what you want to do. Because getting down to inbox zero means you have a pipeline of incoming and outcoming information that you're keeping up with. I mean, the only thing it means if your inbox is getting bigger and bigger, is that the pipeline of stuff coming in, you can't keep up with it, you don't have other systems for it.

And you have this default spillover, let's just keep stuff in our inbox. So let me give you four things you can do, Chris. Four things you can do to improve your relationship with your inbox that will make inbox zero much more tractable. All right, number one, don't use email for back and forth conversation.

Don't, I got to figure something out, we got to go back and forth about it. Don't do that with email that generates a huge amount of email, it's a huge pain. Back and forth conversation should be synchronous. There's a lot of ways to do this. There's office hours, there's calls, they're tacking on conversations to the end of pre existing meetings, however you want to do it.

If it requires back and forth, you should be talking to a person, two minutes can accomplish what 20 back and forth emails would otherwise be required to do. Number two, don't store information in your inbox. This is a child's way of doing knowledge work information management, you're a grown up, you need something more sophisticated.

You have to have places where you store relevant information, you have to have places where you keep track of what you're working on, what you're waiting for, and what you know about it. I personally recommend something like a Trello board, one for each of your different professional roles, where you can keep track of what's in progress, what you know about it, what you're waiting to hear back on.

So if in one of your roles as a professor, you are the head of the faculty advisory committee, I say this from experience, I'm about to take on that role as the head of the faculty advisory committee in September, have a board for that. If there's things you're waiting to hear back from, you're trying to talk to your committee members about when to meet, or you're waiting to hear someone is taking a stab at writing up the report that you're going to bring to the faculty meeting, you should have a column in your Trello board for that role that says waiting to hear back from, and that's where those are, not an email in your inbox that you hope you just see and say, oh yeah, that's right, I'm waiting for someone to respond to that email.

Let's say you're working on something in one of your roles, have a projects column and there's a card for it on your Trello board, and you're attaching the relevant files to it, and right at the top of the card, you say capital letters, status, colon, quick update on that status.

You look at the board for that role, you get the whole just stalled to what's going on in five minutes. None of this needs to be in your inbox. So again, keeping track of what's going on in your inbox is a child's way of managing information. Be an adult, be more sophisticated.

Three, use process-centric emails. Now I talked about this in a habit tune-up, I think Jesse would have to go back to the archives, but I think in the last couple of months, I did a habit tune-up on process-centric emails. There's probably a YouTube video on that at youtube.com/calendarformedia. But here's the brief summary.

When you send an email to someone to initiate something that needs to get done, this meeting has to get set up, this client visit needs to be arranged. First, figure out the entire process for how you're going to get to completion. I will put up some ideas by this date, you will look at those ideas and mark the ones that work best.

I'll then send a complete list once you've marked that on Wednesday morning to the client, and then I'll update you on our staff meeting on Friday, what we're going to do. Come up with the process for how you're going to get from here to completion and explain that process in the very first email you send about that obligation.

Significantly reduces the number of back and forth messages that follow because you have a clear process about what you guys are going to do. Number four, things that are informational, newsletters, like my newsletter, calnewport.com, broadcast of deals, whatever it is that you get just informationally through your inbox where you never know which ones are going to be interesting, what won't, you might want to save things for a while to see if you want to read it, have a separate account for that.

And if it's too late to have a separate account, then set up a filter to a separate label or folder, and you can update what gets filtered and treat that differently. Oh, here's my informational account. Here's my informational label or folder. And that's different. That's outside of your inbox, your worldview, because there's no stress captured by those messages.

None of them make any demands of you or your time. It's a digital library for you to browse at your leisure. So separate that from the rest of your inbox. Then you can inbox zero what remains. All right, Chris, so there you go. The backstory on inbox zero. I wrote about this, that term in a piece I wrote a few years ago for the New Yorker called the rise and fall of getting things done.

Merlin Mann, the productivity guru, Merlin Mann, it was his book contract to write a book titled Inbox Zero that essentially broke him and his interest in productivity. He struggled so philosophically about what's the point of getting super fiddly about processing emails in your inbox. It's actually what broke him.

And he just couldn't write the book. He was on the contract, couldn't do it. And so it was like the Inbox Zero book was what broke. Inbox Zero broke Merlin Mann's productivity standing or interest. It was an interesting little tidbit from the history of productivity.