Zero

I’ll admit to being more than a bit OCD in my desire for a clean and organized workspace. But, from my experience with a slew of coworkers over the years, that’s not an entirely unusual trait. Whether wild creative types or precision-minded engineers, at least 50% seemed to feel and think better when their physical environments were tidy and undistracting, with everything in its right place.

So I’m always shocked by those same people’s email inboxes, which inevitably contain thousands (or even tens of thousands) of read and unread emails. I get agita just from the thought. And, indeed, if you’re a clean-desk type, I’d suspect you, too, would feel similar peace of mind from an equally minimalist inbox.

Try it out yourself, with this simple approach.

First, move all the old stuff into a backlog:

  1. Create a folder (or, in Gmail, label) called “Backlog.”
  2. Select every email in your inbox. (In Gmail, select all using the checkbox icon at the top left, then click the “select all conversations that match this search” link that appears to get select those past the first 50 results.)
  3. Apply the “Backlog” label to all of the messages.
  4. Click the archive icon.
  5. Boom. Inbox zero.

Tomorrow, at some point during the day, your goal is to make sure you empty out every single email that has come in after now. If something doesn’t need action, archive it. If it needs a response, fire one away, then archive it. If it requires a non-email task, a longer response than you want to deal with right now, or is waiting on something, make note of it on your to-do list, then archive it. The important thing is that you get back to zero, daily.

Each day, too, pull up the backlog folder / label, and process part of the way through, starting at the top, the same way you would with the inbox. In my experience, that’s usually faster going, as an increasing percentage of the stuff no longer needs a response as you work backwards. If you have years of stuff in the backlog, once you make it a few weeks (or a month) back, you can probably just archive the balance, as there’s unlikely to be anything active, and if there is – and it’s still important – they’ll email you again.

And that’s it. That’s the recipe for inbox zero. It even works repeatedly if you fall off the wagon, and need to declare a new backlog / need to start again fresh in the future. All you have to do is make your way back to empty again each day, with only a day’s worth of incoming stuff.

People seem to think this requires extra work, but it definitionally doesn’t; if you’re going to respond to an email eventually, it takes the same amount of time regardless of when you do it. So you might as well do it within 24 hours. It’s great to feel on top of your emails. And, as I said, if you’re a neat-freak, the degree to which an empty inbox soothes / allows you to focus on real work is an order of magnitude better than a clean desk.

Step to It

Like many other coaches, trainers, and health gurus, I’ve long recommended people consider tracking their daily step counts, aiming for at least 10,000 a day. And, indeed, research well supports the benefits of getting 10,000 daily steps; hitting that number results in a nearly 50% drop in all-causes mortality as compared to a sedentary baseline.

Still, the precision of 10,000 is a bit arbitrary. It stems from a Japanese 1960’s public service advertising campaign promoting the first cheaply available electronic pedometers, when “manpo-kei,” or “measure 10,000 steps,” made for an easy, succinct, and catchy slogan. Ever since, 10,000 has stuck as the default pedometer goal.

Earlier this month, however, the International Journal of Obesity published a great observational study of Scottish postal workers, examining the relationship between walking and metabolic syndrome (a cluster of health conditions that increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes). Not surprisingly, the study concluded that “compared with those without metabolic syndrome, participants with metabolic syndrome were significantly less active-fewer steps, shorter stepping duration and longer time sitting.”

But tucked in the paper is a more interesting, and more specific, observation: all of the postmen and women who had no symptoms of metabolic syndrome walked at least 15,000 steps per day.

Obviously, there’s only so much we can glean from a single study. But it does suggest that, while 10,000 may be a great initial goal, it might not be the ideal final stopping point. So if you’re tracking your steps, and already consistently hitting 10k, consider upping that goal by 1,000 more each month, until you reach the 15,000 step point. Considering the huge amount of research backing the benefits of walking in general, wedging in a little more of it certainly couldn’t hurt.

Le Déluge

Back when I was in college, and running my first company, I regularly took the Metro North from New Haven to New York City several times a week. Each time I did, I’d stroll through the Posman Books location inside Grand Central, perusing the new fiction and non-fiction laid out on the tables by the front. I kept a list of books I wanted to read. And, dismayingly, despite being a life-long voracious reader, that to-read list always seemed to expand exponentially faster than the list of books I’d actually managed to finish. I remember being a bit depressed about it at the time, knowing I’d simply never be able to read everything I wanted to.

These days, I only rarely make it to a bookstore. Yet, every day, I watch enticing information and ideas stream across my path in an ever-growing number of mediums. On top of books and audiobooks, articles ‘saved to read later’ pile up in Pocket, episodes of podcasts accumulate in Overcast, blog entries stack in Feedly, and Tweets from smart and insightful people rush through my feed all day long.

In a way, that increased information overload has actually been comforting. With just a book-reading backlog to contend with, I could sometimes convince myself that I might, with herculean effort, find a way to ‘catch up.’ But now, with what I’d like to consume so vastly outpacing any conceivable human bandwidth, I’ve been forced to become a bit more zen. I learn what I can, and let the rest go.

Even so, I can’t help but sometimes wish I could freeze time, to finally make my way through all that delightful, fascinating content. As Tolkien observed, “I wish life was not so short. Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.”

March 30, 2017