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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

> I apply a strong inbox 0 methodology

Tangential to the main topic, but this is the only sensible way of running an email inbox, always has been to me, and it boggle my mind, why would anyone let clutter and a piling number of unreads in their one and only inbox, one of the most important things in our digital lives?

Each email is an action item. If it's not or if it's been addressed, it's gone, period.

Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business emails are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.

So why would you have more emails in your inbox than items you’re supposed to act on?

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Because my attention should be directed at what I want to do, when I want to, not a nagging number that sits there being more than zero.

And when I do pay attention to it, I don't want to spend 20 minutes going through the 180 emails that I've been cc'd on. It's literally not worth my time or dilution of my attention. When I have attempted to get on top of this by doing all the curation and rule-authoring that productivity mavens shout about, it works for a little while but entropy sets in.

I'm just not into scripting my own life and maximizing my productivity, and my job does not pivot on prompt email responses. So my email is a garbage dump with tire fires in it, and I know that, and I get on with the things I know are actually important.

I'm not recommending this! It's just the compromise that I have settled in to. But if you wonder "why would anyone," this is it.

Thanks. So no fear of losing important stuff to the noise?

Also mind you, this is not about productivity. If you don't want to act on something, you delete it.

It's very presence in the list is already a drain on my attention that I didn't ask for and do not want. The fact that it requires any action on my part to remove it from the queue is an issue in and of itself.

For mojuba and myself, email is a way to organize TODO items. Things to take care of exist either way, and email is an awesome way to keep track of, and process, events / tasks asynchronously.

shermantanktop and you, forbiddenvoid, seem to refuse organizing TODOs, or perhaps even the concept that external events be allowed to generate TODOs for you ("my attention should be directed at what I want to do, when I want to"). I closely know this -- i.e., "garbage dump with tire fires in it" -- because that's precisely what my SO's mailbox looks like. Whereas I've maintained a perfect inbox 0 for several decades, both at work and privately.

This is an unbridgeable psychological divide between two attitudes toward, or even two definitions of, tasks and obligations. People who can naturally implement inbox 0 never lose track of a task (not just in email, but in any other medium either), and get indignated when they receive reminders. They're excellent schedulers, and orderly, but also frequently obsessive-compulsive, neurotic. People who can't instinctively do inbox 0 cannot be taught or forced to do it, they tend to need repeated reminders, and may still forget tasks. At the same time, they have different virtues; they tend to shine with ill-defined problems and unexpected events.

Neither group is at fault; the difference has biological roots, in the nervous system. Our brains physically differ.

Thanks, that's a great explanation!

I kind of agree, but I explain it differently. Everyone’s job is a mix of reactive and proactive work. For my particular job, reactive work is necessary but will expand to fill all my time and then some. Proactive work is ambiguous and uncertain, but usually ends up being the highest value work that I do.

If I spend all my time on other people’s demands, it will all be urgent, but not enough of it will be important.

That's a super interesting situation (and description).

I always order reviewing the work of others ahead of working on my own code. This works wonders for the team. But admittedly, if the review workload is not distributed well, then my approach produces an annoying imbalance for me, and over the longer term, it leads to burnout.

Put differently, if I enable / assist / mentor others, that produces value comparable to my own personal output, for the company (or that's at least how I understand things). However, the emotional value of each, to me, is comparable only up to a certain extent -- namely, as long as I get to write enough code myself. The proportion must be right.

I rely on management / the team to (self-)organize the review workload, and then I prefer to help others first, and work on my own stuff second. I draw much more satisfaction from working on my own code, but I feel the importance of supporting others, so I prioritize the latter. This particular prioritization too rewards me emotionally, but only up to a certain point. I can say "no", but, in my view, if I have to say "no" frequently, to requests for assistance, then the workload is ill-distributed, and that responsibility is not mine. (I explicitly don't want to be promoted to a level where I become responsible for assigning tasks to people.)

I’m in a senior position and just coming off a year where I intentionally focused on enabling others and making the collective group more effective. That meant more reactive (and less visible) work.

I got feedback that my contributions weren’t tangible and visible enough. I switched gears back to my previous mode (more proactive work) and all is well again.

Different work cultures treat this differently. At another company my enabling activities would have been valued more. But I do think being the glue in a group is usually undervalued.

Not really. I check a couple of times a day, look for stuff from people who are likely important, delete noisy stuff once a week, and the rest lingers.

The threaded nature of email both helps and hurts. If it’s from a chatty sender with a chatty reply all conversation, I can delete it all, except if my boss replies, I should probably look at that.

I should also say that I work at a large company where people are auto-included with varying levels of intention. If I never sent an email, I would still get hundreds per day. Coworkers do zero inbox, so it can be done. I just don’t try anymore. Slack is where the actually urgent stuff is anymore.

> Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business email are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.

An executive co-worker of mine used his Deleted Items folder as his Archive. Problem solved.

But what about the joy of deleting 112 messages from the trash folder every day?

I'm with you. I've had a mostly empty email for at least a decade (< 10 items, with each of them representing an action I'll need to take) and can't imagine doing it differently. I'm one of those empty desk/empty mind people, I guess.

In a just world you would do 16 hours of manual rock breaking and tilling in a gulag for a decade then you can come back and tell is how essential email is to your life, sorry "digital life" whatever the FUCK that is.

You have only one inbox?

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