Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [13]
The worst halfway solution is to delete some e-mail, but not all of it, day after day. When an especially busy day results in an unusually high message count, it’s tempting to delete most of the messages, like spam and FYIs, but allow the todos to sit in the inbox. The next day brings in a new batch of e-mail, sitting on yesterday’s action items. Now it’s easier to go through the new mail than dive back into yesterday’s stale batch, and the user may then let some of the new todos sit in the inbox with yesterday’s.
After a few days of this, you can guess what the inbox looks like: e-mail overload with an infernal twist. The inbox is bulging with a pure, high-octane feed of big action items. It’s worse than a garden-variety inbox, which at least has a few messages that are easily deleted. Now the user is overloaded only with urgent items, and new messages are still pouring in. It’s now much harder to catch up to the empty inbox. Letting e-mails sit in the inbox for more than a day can be a dangerous slippery slope.
There is only one sustainable solution to e-mail overload, and that’s to achieve emptiness every day. It’s such a simple solution that it may seem attractive to apply it only temporarily or partially—but don’t be fooled. The method is an all-or-nothing proposition: either the message count gets to zero once a day, or there’s a problem.
Reactions to Zero
An empty inbox means a count of zero—exactly zero—e-mails. There’s a categorical difference between the experience of having “a few e-mails” and none at all. People who have worked for years with a bulging inbox and see the zero message count for the first time can have some pretty strong reactions, like this e-mail someone sent me shortly after adopting the method:
How does it feel?
Strange: it’s never been like that before, so it takes some getting used to.
Freeing: I open Outlook and sometimes there’s this big white space. With nothing to distract me I can focus on the things I want to focus on.
Efficient: I certainly feel as though I can respond to email more efficiently. Again, with nothing to distract me from new e-mail, I can focus on responding to that mail more effectively.
Strange, freeing, and efficient: that’s an excellent way to describe bit literacy. But some users have a harder time when they first encounter an empty inbox. As one user wrote me, on seeing a zero count for the first time:
It’s 100% empty right now. It feels weird. empty. A VOID.
Like my e-mail crashed or something.
No reading pane, no nothing! Withdrawals!
Another user wrote perhaps the single most accurate reason I’ve ever read for why most users don’t take up this discipline:
To tell you the truth, it’s freeing but scary to have an empty e-mail box. I’ve spent a lot of my days scrolling back and forth through all my e-mails and feeling the urgency. Now I have to focus on real projects.
And that is exactly the point of the method. The sooner the inbox is empty, the sooner the user can get to productive work.
Other Challenges
For some users, the issue isn’t the inbox but “the inboxes.” Many people own multiple e-mail accounts, each accumulating its own e-mail bitstream and racking up its own message count. The obvious way to remove the load, in this case, is to minimize the number of e-mail accounts—simplifying, for example, to one for work and one for personal use.8 Any other superfluous accounts should be shut down. (Just e-mail your friends and coworkers not to e-mail you there any more, and contact the e-mail host to close the account. It’s a free and painless process, and it lets go of one more bitstream.)
Another challenge is practicing bit literacy in a team environment. Some individual team members with a zero count may be enduring needless e-mail volume from teammates, a problem that could be solved with better training or team e-mail policies. For example, guidelines can be set for who should get CC’d on various messages, or when to use the phone instead of e-mail. The most important part of the solution