Death to Inboxes | Daniel Lyons

Table of Contents

Unshackle yourself from the tyranny of the inbox.

You will never be able to keep up with all the messages demanding your attention, and that is okay.

Inbox zero is a scam and a plague. It teaches us that we can somehow achieve a state of perfect organization and control over our digital lives, if only we would follow its rules. It promises zen and peace, only to be immediately flooded by the deluge of more meaningless messages to fight for your attention. What do you honestly gain from inbox zero? A warm fuzzy feeling? Bragging rights? No. What you really gain is the satisfaction of knowing that you achieved a metric that provides no actual value to your life.

Inbox zero won’t cure your cancer, but it will probably give you enough stress to lead to cancer. Inbox zero won’t make your work problems go away, but it will certainly bring your work problems into your weekends. Inbox zero won’t impress your boss, or your customers, or your coworkers, or yourself¹.

But let’s give inbox zero its fair day in court. Let’s pretend for a moment that inbox zero has any positive benefit whatsoever. Exactly how long will inbox zero last? Until inbox one. The moment you get a single email, inbox zero is gone. The clock is ticking. You lost your zen. You have now failed at inbox zero.

But should you really care?

Every inbox is an analogy² to a bygone era that many of us are not old enough to have actually experienced. An inbox was a physical box placed on your desk. Gradually throughout the day coworkers would place more and more items into your inbox. There was a clear expectation from your organization that anything in the inbox that is on your desk needs to be processed by you. You need to read those items, decide what to do, and then do it.

Except in this bygone era, you actually signed up for this job. You agreed to work in an office with an inbox, and so you agreed to process all the items in your inbox. Is that what you signed up for with email? Nope. Email is not your inbox at work. It’s your mailbox in your pocket and it’s flooded with crap. Spam, scams, advertisements, mailing lists that you never consented to³. But all of this is just the tip of the iceberg. Notifications everywhere! Friend requests, message alerts, two-factor authentication 6 digit codes, magic link sign-ins⁴, clutter clutter clutter! Our inboxes look worse than Harry Potter’s mailbox.

But all of these items have one thing in common. You didn’t sign up for them. Sure, they’ll gaslight you into thinking that you did. After all you signed up for their service, didn’t you? But how much say did you really have in the matter? The email address has long been the de facto ID card of the internet. You can’t even buy and use a TV anymore without being forced to give several people an email address.

So why on earth would you owe anyone inbox zero? Everyone is rampantly invading your inboxes and yet for some reason you owe them a response?

Inboxes Are Everywhere

We don’t just have a flood of emails in our email inbox. We have a flood of inboxes across our digital lives! Slack, Messages, Discord, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, GitHub, on and on and on. We have so many inboxes, that our operating systems have another inbox called the notification center, just for holding all our other inboxes.

Every single one of these inboxes has a marketing department that is demanding our attention. Each one is insidiously hijacking our psychology against us by using instinctual stress-inducing colors and dark patterns. Well I’m just plain sick of it.

They want our time and attention, but I don’t care for theirs.

The fundamental issue with the inbox zero concept is that the inboxes in your life are broader and more demanding than ever before. In short, your inbox isn’t just your work email – it’s literally anything that puts a demand on your time: your personal inbox, social media, messaging apps, letters, and even phone calls.

Wired UK: “Everything you thought you knew about inbox zero is wrong”

But for some reason, our society is absolutely obsessed with inboxes. We love inboxes so much that we actually create new inboxes for ourselves. In fact, fellow nerds⁵ who like PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) create dozens and dozens of inboxes in Notion, and Obsidian. They create Inbox folders in their Notes app. They even beg developers to add an inbox feature into their podcast app, for crying out loud.

For a generation, we were told by David Allen and Getting Things Done that we must capture and process all our inputs or else we risk missing something⁶. But the problem⁷ is that we far far underestimated the sheer volume of crap that we have to wade through. Our knees are already buckling under the weight of our current inboxes and yet somehow we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that the solution is to add even more inboxes!

Then we were told that the solution is filters. Gmail has spam filtering built-in, and it’s actually pretty good. But did it get rid of unwanted advertisements in our inboxes? Of course not! Gmail is a free service, offered by a company whose primary source of income is selling ads. Google successfully filtered out obvious Nigerian prince scams, only to sell our usage data and empower spammers to make less obvious scams.

Then we were told that there are all these features to help you personally filter your inboxes. Now we have labels, and smart rules, and tagging and here are guides like Ten Steps I Used To Get To Inbox Zero And Master My Hustle Business. The implication is obvious: If you can’t get to inbox zero, it’s your fault. Well I don’t buy it anymore.

Inbox 2.0: The Feed

Then the inbox morphed into its unholy cousin, the feed. YouTube used to have a model where you would subscribe to channels and you would get new episodes in your inbox. But now YouTube is an infinite scroll of algorithmically picked content designed to prevent you from ever leaving their site.

It’s called the feed because it feeds you with more and more content, and yet it repeatedly leaves you anemic and unfulfilled. The real reason why it’s called a feed is because every time you look at the feed you are feeding their service with your vital attention, and you are feeding their wallets with ad revenue.

This is an abusive relationship and you know it.

The Better Way: Death To Inboxes

There is a better way, but it requires effort, stubborn persistence, and the courage to be weird. Kill your inboxes. Mute them and, when possible, remove them altogether. Unsubscribe from email feeds that provide you no value. Delete social media apps that manipulate you into addictive doom scrolling. Refuse to read from news providers who repeatedly hook you in with misleading headlines only to deliver an article designed to stir up your anxiety and rage. Turn off practically all your notifications. In fact, while you’re at it, why don’t you get rid of your phone…? (Dang, even I’m not courageous enough to be that weird⁸!)

Be ruthless. They are ferociously attacking your attention span and so you must ferociously defend it.

Nine times out of ten, the best inbox is called a trash can!

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you are stronger than this. There’s probably a voice inside of you that is saying, “I don’t need to cut out inboxes from my life. I’m fine. That’s your problem, not mine. I’ve got self-control and I can focus.” Buddy, if that’s how you’re thinking, then you already lost the battle.

There’s an army of marketing geniuses who have honed their skills over several decades to discover exactly how to kick you while you’re down. Don’t forget they also have a navy of invasive data scientists, and an air force of deceptive PR departments. Yes, you’ve got discipline and focus, but they’ve got patience, persistence, and billions of dollars in targeted advertisements. Your willpower and attention span is a finite resource and their straw is gonna drain it dry.

Steve Jobs famously wore the same black turtleneck every day, and supposedly he did this just so that he would have one less decision to make every day. If Steve Jobs understood that his attention was limited then what makes you think you can handle a million decisions every day?

These companies act like they care, yet they demonstrably do not. These people care so little about the general public that they keep track of when teenage girls delete a selfie just so that they know when she’s likely feeling self-conscious and would be more susceptible to a beauty product ad. If they care so little about you, then you should care even less about all the junk they are shoving into your inboxes.

Curate Your Inboxes

Should you kill every inbox? You can certainly try. Get off grid and go live in a van down by the river if you want. But that doesn’t sound very healthy now, does it? After all, you’re a part of this world, aren’t you?

Don’t just cut things out of your inboxes. Thoughtfully choose what you will allow into your inboxes. There should be a very high bar for what you allow in your inbox. You are the VIP CEO of your life. Everyone must interview for your attention, and the default answer should be no!

Reward content creators who…:

respect your time and attention.⁹
leave you feeling better than before (in the long run, not just in the moment).
choose not to use manipulative tactics even though they might be losing out on cash.
focus on quality even when it requires posting less frequently.
create content that is actually useful, empowering, and enlightening.
inspire you to be a better person.
prioritize your well-being over profit.
provide a clear value proposition that aligns with your goals and interests.
encourage critical thinking and personal growth.
promote healthy discussions and diverse perspectives, challenging you to step outside of your thought bubbles.

Set yourself up for success. Save what matters. Trash what doesn’t.

Make FOMO, No Mo'

What if I miss something, important? You will miss something, and that’s what’s so great about it. You’ll miss scams, spam, childish celebrity drama, frivolous tech hype, cancerous cancel campaigns, and so so many ads.

The truth is, most of what you think is important, is really just noise. Stop worrying about missing out. Kick FOMO to the curb! By eliminating the noise, you can discover what truly matters.

In my time on this earth, I’ve discovered that important things will surface themselves. They don’t demand your attention like the petty things in our inboxes. Important things just are important. If it’s actually important, then you will probably find it, eventually. Remember this. Trust it. Feel it. Believe it.

You have a limited number of moments left in your life, and you are utterly surrounded by people who are telling you what to do with the moments you have left. What on earth is more precious than your time? You can earn money. You can accumulate resources. But when you spend your time, there is no refund policy. And you are always spending your time.

“When you come back [from vacation], you might say, ‘Oh my God, there’s so much of this [email]’. But then you realize, I didn’t even see this email and somehow the world kept spinning.”
Merlin Mann: Wired UK: “Everything you thought you knew about inbox zero is wrong”

Quit Keeping Up With The Joneses

Quit keeping up with the Joneses. Quit chasing the carrot on the end of that stick. Quit running in the hamster wheel of futility. It’s not only exhausting, it’s soul-crushing. Your soul needs something more.

The dirty little secret is the Joneses aren’t keeping up with themselves. Influencers pretend to own giant luxurious homes while slaving to the same hustle culture as the rest of us. They stir up our envy and then sell us products to try to fill the void. The crowd is filled with fake success.

But even genuine success is not all it’s cracked up to be. When we study the successful, we so often fall prey to survivorship bias. We believe that what happened to work for them has gotta work for me too. Yet we ignore the thousands of others who tried the same thing and failed. We ignore the massive role that luck and timing played¹⁰ in their success. But the real problem is that we mistakenly think that success will bring us ultimate satisfaction. It won’t.

A wise Man once said “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?”

The Outbox

What’s often missing from our modern understanding of the ‘inbox’ is its physical counterpart: the outbox. In that bygone era, when you received items from your coworkers, there wasn’t just a pile of inbox items, there was an outbox. You were expected to process the items and then put them in the outbox. Then they would be collected and sent to someone else’s inbox.

Your outbox is someone else’s inbox. Our inboxes are drowning in drivel, but what are you and I putting into our outboxes? What are you putting into someone else’s inbox? Do your words bring life or death?

But even the outbox is not what truly matters. What’s most important is what is between the inbox and the outbox. What did you do with the items when they were still on your desk? In this mysterious work shift that we call life, we all come in through a great inbox, and one day we will all leave through the final outbox. One day your Boss will look at the work that you did, with the time and resources that you had, and He will say either “Well done, good and faithful servant” or “Depart from me!” What will He say to you and I?

Acknowledgments

Merlin Mann: The original proponent of Inbox Zero. Although I spent the majority of this essay trashing the concept of inbox zero, I do want to acknowledge that Merlin Mann was onto something important. He was one of the first people to recognize that our inboxes were out of control and that we needed to do something about it. I just think his solution (triaging everything) was ultimately inadequate. But apparently, he realized that before I did.
Reagan Rose: Huge thank you to Reagan for offering me feedback on this essay. I picked a hyperbolic antagonistic tone, and I was worried that it might be taken the wrong way. Reagan gave me the confidence to lean into that tone and helped me refine my arguments. Check out his work at RedeemingProductivity.com and on his YouTube channel. It’s been a wonderful influence on me.

Every Inbox Is A Commitment You Didn’t Sign Up For