Is This The Worst Productivity Hack?

Most emails are other people’s agendas, not yours. Don’t let the religion of Inbox Zero keep you from prioritizing your own goals.

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As an executive coach and former entrepreneur, I’m the target audience for productivity hacks and trends. I’ve seen many come and go—good ones, bad ones, and weird ones.

The one that keeps crossing my radar with friends and clients lately is Inbox Zero. This one inspires strong feelings: Some people love it, others hate it. But what’s clear is that a grueling standard of email management is becoming the norm.

What is Inbox Zero? As the name makes obvious, it’s an aspirational state of organizational purity and a technique for supposedly decluttering your mind by decluttering your inbox. Inbox Zero proponents use various sorting, answering, and organizational methods to end each day with an empty inbox, or as close to empty as possible. For most of us, that’s no small task, with daily email traffic reaching almost 3.5 billion in 2023 and expected to only continue rising.

Here’s my take: Inbox Zero is a shitty goal.

There, I said it.

In my opinion, this technique is over-hyped and misses the mark. There are exceptions to any rule, of course, and I’m happy to entertain those exceptions. But in general, making sure you get to Inbox Zero every day is majoring in the minor. The flip side of getting to zero (or close) is leaving a lot of performance on the table.

We all have goals, aspirations, and priorities. If you’re running a company, you have targets that you’re looking to hit. You’ve got clear priorities. I highly doubt that there is ever a good reason for a leader of a company to have a goal of ‘reaching Inbox Zero’ every day. Ideally, we spend our days engaged in goal-oriented behavior, meaning that we act in whatever way is most optimal for achieving our goals. This includes activities like focused problem-solving, writing, sending emails, reading, learning, researching, conducting meetings, giving feedback, etc. In a perfect world, the ratio of time we’re spending on each of those activities will align with what’s needed to yield the results we’re after.

For leaders and creatives especially, answering every request (small or large, urgent or non-urgent, important or unimportant) and getting it all done by the end of the day is not generally a use of time that ultimately supports their priorities.

Keep your eyes on your agenda

I know some popular executive coaches who advise Inbox Zero, and I’m sympathetic as to why. For your company to achieve velocity, you can’t have the CEO be a bottleneck, so they must be swift in their email processing. If you’re the linchpin of the company as CEO, people and teams are waiting on you, so you must process your emails twice a day. I agree that this is good hygiene in some cases.

But I think it’s important to say that you must triage and process the right emails at the right time. I’m all for a solid framework for addressing emails. I’m a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done method, where you snooze certain messages and move others to folders to be addressed at a later date. I am super down for that kind of Inbox Zero, especially with an executive assistant supporting the triaging and proper delegation and deferring to manage emails you shouldn’t spend time on. But answering every single thing that comes across your desk each day until there are no more requests is a sad game of whack-a-mole that won’t get you very far toward your goals. We are sold a false promise of ‘feeling calmer’, only achieved by temporarily winning the whack-a-mole game by spending more time on email and doing it faster.

If you did an audit of how you spent your time, you might be shocked to see how much of your work time is dedicated to email. And here’s the thing: Most emails are other people's agenda, not yours. We don’t want to be a master of other people’s agendas, we want to be a master of our agenda. If you’re stuck in the religion of daily Inbox Zero, you’re probably not adequately prioritizing your goals.

There are certain people in my life (you may know some yourself) who will always respond to me right away. Their reply to a text, email, or phone call always comes back instantaneously. This signifies to me that their notifications are on and that they are willing to be interrupted at any moment. They are basically saying that focus, and the work that requires full focus, doesn’t matter. The message is that what they’re doing isn’t that important because they’re willing to be pulled away from it. They are saying that their goals aren’t that important and their pursuit of their goals isn’t that important.

It goes without saying that we can become addicted to this. There’s a payoff to checking emails, and there is a payoff to getting to Inbox Zero. All mental clutter fades and you breathe deeper and see some beautiful landscape or something (I don’t know what the reward is these days because I don’t get there). Email is a product, and in this modern era, products are designed to get us to use them more often. That’s the incentive of the people who create these products. My personal feeling is that I check my email too often and I’d like to dial it back. There’s a strong pull to keep checking (we all love a dopamine hit!). But doing this fries our attention. It’s a really unproductive and damaging behavior—and ultimately, it’s just not worth it.

Every morning, take a moment to clarify your goals and what you’re going to do that day that will give you the best shot at making progress toward those goals. This is where you want to conduct your energy.

When it comes to email as a leader, you should try to maintain an efficient system that ensures important tasks and communication aren't missed, rather than obsessing over an empty inbox. Ideally, you limit how often you’re checking. I like having two sessions per day where I review my email, in the morning at some point and towards the end of the work day. Whatever it is, find a system that works for you, and don’t forget to make the main thing the main thing.