Geoff 1; Inbox 0

As I'm typing, my email inbox—the mailbox where otherwise uncategorized business, personal, unexpected, and sometimes unwanted email messages accumulate—stands empty. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. No messages.

I'm sure that'll change in a few minutes. The useless (yet amusing) statistics feature in my ever-aging email application says I receive about 2,500 email messages a week. So something is going to turn up.

A significant portion my email comes from mailing lists on which I lurk (that is, I save and periodically discussions, but rarely contribute directly); right now I subscribe to perhaps 12 or 15 active mailing lists (down from maybe 50 years ago) and those messages are filtered into separate folders away from by inbox. Similarly, I receive a bunch of administrative email (logs, alerts, reports, and the like) which gets filtered to special cubbies. And, of course, since I've been using some email addresses for well over a decade, I receive a lot of spam—what isn't stopped at my servers typically gets pushed out of sight by filters. And email accounts specific to my long-term clients don't deliver directly to my inbox: those messages are also shunted off to sub-folders.

But everything else lands in my inbox. Email from friends, clients, acquaintances, family, people I haven't heard from in years, news blips, and updates from sometime-clients, random queries from my silly contact form (I seem to be a primary source of information about Da Vinci's Inquest and guitar trivia), messages and notices from online businesses (legitimate messages, mind you!), and unexpected notes out of the blue.

Despite about 20 years of using email, I've never gotten very good at it. I used to use my inbox an informal database of messages which didn't obviously belong anywhere else but I didn't feel an immediate need to delete. I'd let messages accumulate, some of them staying around for a year or more. (And I archive the bulk of my real email: if you sent me a message as long ago as the late 1980s, I can probably pull it up if I get really determined.) These habits used to strain available storage and bring email programs to their knees.

Why did I let my inbox get so big? Maybe because a message had an email address or a phone number I thought I might need, but more likely because I intended to respond to a message—or at least use it as a reminder about something else—but hadn't gotten around to it yet. Maybe I thought it might be useful later. Sometimes I'd have over 1,000 messages in my inbox; at one point, I know I had more than 1,800. And, too often, by the time I "got around" to a message, there was just no point to keeping it around anymore. Or at least no point to keeping it in my inbox anymore.

So, starting last year, I began making a conscious effort to keep my inbox manageable, which in practice means less than 45 messages the way I have things configured. If more email accumulated, the messages had to be less than a week old or directly related to a front-burner project. Anything else had to be acted on, responded to, filed away, or deleted.

I'd been doing OK with that until a few weeks ago, when suddenly I found I had some 250 messages in my inbox, some of which were a few months old. Admittedly, a few of those were just hard-to-deal with messages, and about a few dozen related to a task which has been rapidly jumping on and off my radar for over two months, so they were arguably relevant.

But as of this moment? Acted on, filed away, responded to, or deleted. And the inbox is empty.

I'm not claiming I'm all caught up on email. I know I owe many messages to many people, some going back years (and years before that, even). But sometimes a line has to be drawn, and I've pencilled it in. For now, the goal is an empty inbox at the end of every week. We'll see how that goes.

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