Everything You Thought You Knew About Inbox Zero Is Wrong
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Forget everything you think you know about inbox zero: it's completely and utterly wrong.
Merlin Mann, the lifestyle "guru" who invented the concept of inbox zero in the early noughts, claims people took his idea far too literally. They advocated treating work emails like a never-ending task to be completed: Once an email has been acknowledged it should be immediately archived, never to clutter the inbox again. Advocates of this philosophy even released handy tips on how to achieve this through infinite tags and categories.
But people soon realized this is not just tedious but a massive waste of time. Mann, who admits his own work inbox is embarrassingly cluttered, agrees.
It is impossible to keep on top of even the simplest of email inboxes without driving yourself completely insane. But at the threshold of another decade, he believes there is a second chance to get it right. So rather than trying to tackle 10 years of bad email behavior, read his simple steps to enter an inbox zero existence.