I'm trying to befriend my inbox, and failing...

On my way back home yesterday, I stopped by my letterbox. The letterboxes in my apartment are conveniently positioned near the entrance in front of the staircase - so there's a visual reminder for me to check for post as I come in. Last evening when I checked, I had one work document and a few pizza adverts. I closed my letterbox, took my mail upstairs, discarded the adverts, filed the work document and went about the rest of my evening. Seems ordinary enough, isn't it?

What would be out-of-the-ordinary is if I left my letterbox open, sat next to it for 8 hours, read and replied to my mail right there, and patiently waited for the postman to arrive with new mail. Now this sounds excessive in the context of a letterbox, but this is exactly what I'm doing with my virtual mailbox.

Look down at your taskbar right now. Is your inbox open? Do you see a letter icon silently screaming YOU'VE GOT MAIL? Iain Thompson wrote an interesting article on sitting with your emails open. He says,

Remember an email is a form of communication and most emails you receive require no action or follow up. For example, somebody has dropped a set of keys in the car park and 1000 people get an email asking if they have lost a set of keys. Back in the day you would hand them in at reception, the person who has lost the keys would realize and think where would they be?

I found some useful advice from The Guardian writer, Oliver Burkeman who wrote - Sit back, relax and ignore your email inbox. Nobody expects you to read it all

When you check email at fixed times, you’re taking control of when it enters your mental world; check it whenever a new message comes in, and essentially email is controlling you.

Different platforms of communication also have different rules of expected response times or replying behaviours. Oliver says,

If you reply to me on Twitter, but your message scrolls out of sight before I see it, it’s probably gone for good – and I’m afraid I don’t have the bandwidth to feel bad about that. But I cling to the notion that email’s different: that’s it’s governed, rightly, by a default assumption that every message sent to me, or by me, deserves a reply.

Some of us use our inbox as our to-do list.

When you work on your tasks with your inbox open, you might be easily distracted by new emails that pop in, especially if the subject screams "URGENT: ...". This would completely topple the priorities you had set out while creating the initial to-dos and you'd have to play a never-ending game of catch up.

In an eight point guide, Oliver Burkeman advises,

Think of the inbox as somewhere that emails pause, temporarily, en route to somewhere else, rather than as a place where you store them. If it's rubbish, delete it.

Can you apply minimalism to your inbox?

Michael Ofei suggests that we apply minimalism to our mail boxes. His section on "Life before Email" reminded me of my physical letterbox analogy.

Many of you reading this post have thousands of messages sitting in your inbox right this moment. If represented physically, you wouldn’t have enough space in your house to store these letters.

What I really liked in his perspective is how we need to actively remind ourselves to "Get back to long-form written communication". We're surrounded by instant messaging apps which have normalized one-liners. I would casually send 3 sentences in succession on WhatsApp but now I'm doing that in emails too (3 different emails, one line each - Sheesh!).

Have you heard of Email Bankruptcy?

Mike Musgrove introduced me to this intriguing concept in his article for the Washington Post.

This is a fancy way of saying "Leave Me Alone". In my opinion if we don't regain some control over our mailing practices, this is where we'd all end up (in the same boat as the venture capitalist Fred Wilson).

E-mail overload gives many workers the sense that their work is NEVER done. A lot of people like the feeling that they have everything done at the end of the day!

What about you - have you befriended your inbox, or is it an ongoing experiment?