 From New America and Slate, I'm Bridget Schulte, and this is Better Life Lab. I want to travel back in time to a date that, for me at least, has kind of lived in infamy, July 23rd, 2007. That's when productivity wizard Merlin Mann took the stage at Google and gave an influential tech talk. He called it Inbox Zero. The single practice that I think could really change your life starting today is to process to zero. Process to zero every time you check your email. You never check your email without processing. A lot of people get really good at checking email and they don't always get so good at doing anything about it. Such an appealing idea, right? But Inbox Zero became kind of an obsession for me, and I never got there. Actually, it's worse. I got there once. I actually wrote a story about having 23,768 emails in my inbox that I did get down to zero. Only I didn't do anything else. And then the next morning, there was about another 23,000 emails of everybody responding to all the emails I sent. It was crushing. So 12 years later, I am still struggling with the idea of Inbox Zero. And I finally realized I needed to confront my demons. I needed to have it out with Merlin Mann himself. So first of all, thank you so much for agreeing to talk with me. And I'm not quite sure if I should say this from the outset, but I kind of hate you. Join the club. You came up with the idea of Inbox Zero as sort of the ultimate nirvana, the utopia that we all need to get to in this crazy making world of email. Is that what I did? You know, I believed you. Did you read it? Did you really read it? Well, I listened to your Google talk that you gave in 2007. And I just want to say I have spent the entire night not going to bed, just intent on cleaning out my inbox, getting to Inbox Zero, to look up and see that it was 7 a.m. and it was time to get up and start the day. This is going to be a very interesting call. Because you're doing it wrong, Bridget. That's not what it's for. Okay, well good, because yeah, I still haven't written my second book because I'm so focused on cleaning out my damn inbox. Let's not worry about Inbox Zero so much, but let's see what we can do to help you. We can get you out of this situation and focused on the stuff you'd really like to be doing. If you have time to check email, you have time to do something with that email. Otherwise, you shouldn't even bother checking. And a lot of times that's deleting it. It's archiving it. It's just not doing anything at all. It could be a short response, but I have to get it out of the way straight ahead. Inbox Zero does not mean sitting in your inbox all day and get rid of email. That's quite the opposite of what I said, let alone intended. It's been willfully misperceived and kind of it's a fun joke now. But the truth of it is that the real zero is how much of your mind is on email. Oh, I like that. When you're trying to do your actual work. And I wouldn't begin to say that that's a simple or easy problem to solve, but there are ways to do it no matter what solution you come up with. It's going to take a change of your own attitude and then a very mindful attempt to set yourself to having the life that you want to have rather than feeling led around by a bunch of bits and bytes on the computer. I mean, I like that idea that what you're talking about is almost like mindset zero. The name is really to me is very inconsequential. Your problem is that you have let this inbox become a source of anxiety by accepting this as an input that you're going to treat in a given way. Anything that is an inbox in your life and that could be your email. It could be Slack. It could be a person in your life. Anything that you are responsible for taking care of and doing something about necessarily contains things that are unknown. Very likely contains things that are undefined. And then on top of it all contains things that are incomplete. And if you think about that crazy idea for a minute, you're going to let this thing run your life. You would not put up with a cutlery drawer that sometimes had a Wolverine in it. How could you how could you run your life out of something where it literally anybody can put anything in there. And if you carry around this mantle, this responsibility that you're going to respond to every one of them, you're a crazy person. So I mean, it's fine. I'm glad people like the idea. It's a cute name. I kind of at this point regret ever saying it. All everyone to do is help myself and help other people get their brain out of this idea that they had to be controlled by this thing, that they basically people would essentially have a second job, which was just doing their email. Right. But this input is never ending. And I think, you know, like what you're talking about, that it's crazy making the Wolverine and the cutlery drawer. But I think a lot of us are living with the Wolverine and the drawer. I mean, if you look at some of the research like Bain and Company, they've looked at sort of how in particular knowledge workers who really need email and use email and how they work. And they'll spend, I think between emails and meetings, the average middle manager spends only six hours a week on sort of concentrated, important, meaningful work. So I would argue that the Wolverine is like running roughshod over all of us. And so how do we need to shift the way we think? Well, a lot of it is an expectations game. It's a question of the expectations that you perceive coming from other people and the expectations that you have of yourself. There's no tip, trick, life hack, anything that's going to help you unless you get down to addressing how you look at this input in your life and what you're committed to doing about it. Part of the problem here is when I say those expectations, like how do we deal with our colleagues? What expectation do we create with them? What is the culture of our team, our company, our organization? Is this sustainable for everybody? Is this where we want to be doing that? And, you know, I think a lot of it is a reluctance to realize that you can't do everything. And nobody likes to let other people down. Nobody likes to say no. Nobody likes to be obdurate or tardy. It makes us feel bad. We feel bad about ourselves. We feel like we're being disrespectful of others. But, let's say, for example, you're a manager. If you're a manager and you're mainly communicating with other people, that makes a ton of sense. But if you're somebody who's a developer or you're somebody who's an engineer, it's difficult for me to understand how you could tolerate spending that much time. You're responding. Guess what? You're building an expectation. You're saying to somebody, my time is so up for grabs that I'll stop whatever I'm doing and take care of it. And there are times when that's like with you. I think I responded to your emails pretty quickly. You know why? Because I look at my email once and I'm done. I think I pretty quickly said, let's schedule this right now. We didn't have 17 different exchanges about needing to go out and have a cup of coffee and talk about it. There's action. That is a very practical approach, but it's all underpinned by a philosophical difference in the way that you choose to look at any input in your life. And I think that's difficult for people. It's especially difficult when you feel like you're the only one who's having trouble holding up your end. So what are you going to do? You're going to make yourself crazy? I just don't think it's a smart way to live. Yeah, so interesting though. You're talking about that sense of feeling badly, that that's a really human notion. The behavioral scientist, Dan Arelli, the way he described email, it's like when somebody taps you on the shoulder, what are you going to do? You're not going to turn around. You know that there's something that feels sort of very rude if we ignore all of that stuff in there. And yet on the flip side, like you say, if you respond to everything, then you've just made everybody else's priorities your agenda. And it varies so much by team, by vocation, something I learned very early on being very strident about this position that you shouldn't spend all your time in email. Well, a lot of people, especially sort of low to middle level people in an organization would say, well, if I don't check my email, my boss is going to think that I'm not working, that I'm not responding quickly enough. So there is another part of this that I do want to underscore, which is it depends on what is okay with your team and your group. I know that's not an easy conversation to have, but I don't know if, you know, email, there's lots of other avenues now. To be honest, I have to say for years, I feel like the thing that has overtaken email is the most maddening thing is meetings. But there are things like Slack. There are so many different ways you can choose to communicate with more precision and brevity. And I think when teams have an opportunity to greatly improve the culture of how they work together, when they explore tools that are there to solve a problem, rather than just open the passage to its largest aperture, there's a reason your house has a door. You're not a jerk for closing your door after six o'clock. You're not a jerk to close your door at all. It's your house. But that expectation is so different. You would think it's weird if a vacuum salesman shows up at two in the morning. But in this case, anybody's allowed to bug you about anything and how often have you gotten that email, that email that's basically some kind of tragic information stew where there might be one bit of meat in the penultimate paragraph. And it's your job to go in there, like some kind of forensic scientist and find out what they're asking about. There's no magic wand that's going to make this go away. And guess what? This is going to be the rest of your life. You need to get a healthy attitude about what you're able to do, what you're going to commit to do, and that will still let you be a wholesome and healthy person without feeling like you're 100% available to 100% of the world, 100% of the time. So as Merlin Mann was telling me all this, I realized that some sort of fluffy little air bubbles were forming over my head, like in cartoons. Those little thought bubbles filled with ampersands and exclamation points and number signs. I just wanted to stop to freeze our conversation. And I wished I could have someone else there listening over my shoulder, like a friendly genie. Now, of course, you can't do this sort of thing in real life, but sometimes on this podcast, I do get to use my magic wand. The voice I really wished I could hear belongs to Amy Westervelt. Hello. Amy's a busy freelance writer. She writes for The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and she just can't afford to waste time on email. I love his take on email, actually. But I feel like it's really funny because I feel like he has all the same reasons for inbox zero that I have for like inbox 100,000. Which is like that, yeah, you can't let someone's need to send you an email at 2 a.m. dictate, like, we know how you're going to structure your day. I'm impressed by his ability to sort of like train people not to send him email. I feel like I have the same approach as him as a recipient of email, but I have not successfully dissuaded people from continuing to send me lots of emails. So one of the things he talked about is that it really depends on your context. He's in more of the tech and IT world, and so maybe those are emails that are very action items. I did, I sent him an email over the weekend. It's just like, what if there's something that you need to think about? Like I have so much stuff that's still sitting in my inbox because I'm not sure what I want to do. You know, I need to think about it. And his response, which actually came within 10 minutes is like, it goes on a to-do list. It doesn't say the inbox. You know, so what do you do about, you know, so you're a writer. What do you do with those things that you're not sure what you want to do with and you need to think about, and maybe they're not like immediate action items? Yeah, see, I kind of treat my email inbox like a filing system, and I feel like I can imagine Merlin cringing at that. But I do. It's sort of like, there's a whole bunch of things. I would say about like 30% of my inbox is things that I was like, oh, that could be an idea for a story at some point. And granted, I have things that I thought about like 10 years ago that are still in my inbox. So that's probably not the most efficient thing. But I don't have like a neat and tidy alternate filing system to keep track of things, and so it has sort of become kind of a tracking system slash like insane Rolodex. Insane Rolodex. You know, one of the reasons that I wanted to talk with you about this is because I stress out about it, you know, and it pollutes my brain and it seems like on every week when I do sort of a brain dump, like what's the stuff I want to get to this week? I always have email clean out, email clean back, inbox clean out, and I obviously never get to it and it bugs me, it really bothers me. So you may have inbox 100,000, but it doesn't bother you. But so what I want to know is how did you get there? Because was there a time when you were also sort of bugged by having all the stuff in there that you couldn't get to all the time? Yeah, yeah, I definitely was worried about it and I was worried about that and like organizing my desktop and I had this time in my life where I was the sole provider for a family of four as a freelancer. So like every hour that I work has to generate a certain amount of income because it also costs me money to work because I have childcare costs. Oh wow, right, yeah. So I had to get just very sort of militant about is this going to generate dollars at the end of this hour and that kind of like broke my fever of email concern because I was just like, okay, that I need to respond to because that's someone who I'm going to invoice next week or that's an editor that is going to give me an assignment that's going to generate X amount of dollars. My husband is like kind of an efficiency expert guy and I know it can be handy. He was seriously pushing his system on me for years and I was like, get your spreadsheet out of my life. Like I'm a creative person. I don't do spreadsheet, you know? So was there spreadsheet around email? I mean, did he have kind of a productivity system around his email? It's more of like how you're structuring your day in general. So like you have to pick your priorities for each day and each week and those two things combined kind of helped me to yeah, just sort of not care that my email inbox was getting super, super cluttered. And now it's like I really, really genuinely don't care. There was a moment where I was really overwhelmed and the email was just pouring in this kind of like raging river, if you will. And I finally to my horror found out like in two days that I'd actually promised to be in three different places in three different cities at the very same time. So I think maybe that's part of what fuels that fear is that you just get overwhelmed and you can't remember. I wonder if it's, is it fear that we're going to miss out that really keeps driving us to check all the time. And I think so. I think that is a big part of it. And then also, you know, you get into that thing sometimes of like when you're expecting or wanting a particular email and you're like hitting that refresh. Oh yeah, I've been there. Yeah. But then I kind of just came to the conclusion that if something is really important, the person will call me. I've had people tweet at me on Twitter is for some reason like I'm easier to reach on there. Well, and it's funny that you talk about Twitter because that's actually how I found you in the first place. It's like anybody else deal with like hashtag email overload. And then then you, you tweeted back at me. It's like I have 33,000 unread emails in my inbox. Does that count? And if you recall, like all of our communication has been over Twitter, I have not emailed you once. That's true. It's true. Yeah. So let's go back to that conversation with Merlin Mann who more than a decade ago, somewhat to his own regret coined the term inbox zero. You know, since the mid to late 90s, since email became an inexpensive and very, I would say almost a very democratic thing. Long before Twitter, it was pretty neat that I could write an email to Jack Clugman and say, hey, I really liked you on the odd couple. Did you do that? Did you do it? Of course I did. I had a whole book of addresses of famous celebrities. That's awesome. But did he respond to you? He didn't. He's a very busy guy. But here's another part of this, though, is that you could receive some very ill-formed, poorly thought out, non-actionable stuff from just about anybody. And I think that can make you feel like a little bit nuts. I mean, I got on the internet in 1993 and it was just a little Telnet program to get on the internet. And email was a joy. It was so fun to basically be talking to my friend who went to Oxford and I'd write to him and he'd write back. But the expectations were so different then. Back then, to get on the internet, you had to be at a computer with a modem or a hard-wired connection. And basically it was like going to mass to go to your email. You went to email and you did the email and then you went back to your job and there was absolutely zero expectation. You'd be able to do anything about it right then. Use of facts for something important like that. Just that that really changed. Like I say, it's not costly. It's easy for people to have. And in the absence of a culture that guides people toward what is okay and not, it becomes the Wild West. How often have you gotten that email that's CC to 25 people and nobody does anything about it? Or they spend their day running around. Yeah, so... All the time, all the time, all the time. I have all kinds of thoughts on how to write a good subject line, how to write a good short email that'll get action from people or get a response from people. How to make it easy for people. Have lots of thoughts on that. What I don't have a solution for is how to stop billions of strangers from having access to you in a way that you have no control over. Only you can decide how you're going to govern that. It's interesting. I was looking to see who researched email. I wanted to see is there some expert that I could talk to. Like what's the proper way to think about emails? Since it's driving all of us crazy. And I came across some, some of the research that's been done is sort of in the computer science field itself. And the bottom line was, wow, email's a real problem. We need more research. It's like nobody knows what the answer is. So did you come to some kind of breaking point where you're like, there is no answer. I got to come up with something different. I feel like I have little sort of flash bulb memories of the evolution of the web and the internet. 95 is when I started making web pages and doing web work. But you know, when we got the graphical web in 94, it felt like a big deal. When AOL started offering internet access, that became a big deal. By the late 90s for me, so much more of my work was being conducted via email. Another thing that came in the side door that we can't forget, because it feels like a solved problem now was what people call spam, basically unsolicited commercial email. It became really trying. Those things all came together to make it very difficult. And I have to say at that same time, I don't have a particular breaking point, but I do know that if you're having dozens or hundreds of individual conversations, I hope to Christ it's with people that you really like and treasure, because that is a way to see your whole life just go out the window. So, you know, for me it was just that I saw myself and my friends, I saw people feeling like they had a second job. They had the job that they got the pay stuff for. And then they had the job which was taking care of email. This is still true today for people like teachers. I can't imagine how my kid's teacher keeps up with it all. I think it's true for just about everybody. Most people do feel like they've got a second job. Like what led you to that moment, you know, to get you to that speech in 2007 at Google where you kind of lay out inbox zero that then has just taken over the world rightly or wrongly? Well, the two words have. I'm not sure people have actually learned much about the ideas, but well, you know, there's one thing I feel like I should mention. I'll touch the third rail here and say there's also an element of privilege to this which is that the ability to get to decide how you're going to deal with email is almost a class issue in some ways. Yeah, definitely. It's certainly at least a hierarchical issue. It's a power issue, yeah. Over the years I've become very interested in how culture works inside of companies and I still really feel like at best the culture of your group is going to be defined by the most powerful people through two things. Basically what they reward and what they tolerate. I don't mean to sound like a guru, but I really believe this. If you, people very clearly see rewards, they see somebody, like maybe that person gets a private office or that person has something other people don't have, but they also see what's tolerated. And that's the Soto Voce kind of like the grace note through most companies. He's like, wow, that guy with the Corvette or the Ferrari or whatever, boy, he sure gets away with double parking and coming late to meetings. And that sends a signal to everybody on the team, again, what do we reward, what do we tolerate. And I don't know if that's something that most managers take as seriously as they should. And if you tolerate the idea of people sending terrible emails, then you're going to have to deal with the problem of people receiving terribly. Well, I think the research... There's not much we can do about what we receive. It's really about it's what people send. That's the problem. And the research shows that a lot of leaders send these after-hour emails because we tend to not only tolerate but definitely reward people who seem to be working all the time. And there's really interesting research that shows that the mere anticipation of an after-hour email from your supervisor or your boss creates more stress than actually getting that email. And so it puts everybody in the state of being in this kind of constant vigilance, like this fear. There's this readiness. Yeah, exactly. So you can't kind of disconnect and enjoy the rest of your life, necessarily. And it all comes from power and privilege, like you say. But let's go back to you. I still want to figure out, like, so how did you get to, like, inbox zero? And then I want to know, where are you now and how many emails do you have in your inbox? What do you think about that? Well, the irony of this is that it's actually a weirdly inbox zero-esque approach that I have to this, which is I have control of very, very few things in the world and extremely limited energy, like everybody else. And that's just not a hell I want to die on. Just spending a huge amount of time trying to re-explain something that, A, was meant to be useful to people and, B, has been just so broadly misunderstood. I'm not but heard about it. I'm just exhausted by it. It's just, it's become, it's become such a millstone that this, you know, 12-year-old idea is something that I'm supposed to constantly re-defend, even though people can't be troubled to listen to what I was actually trying to offer. Inbox zero does not mean you always keep your inbox empty. It means you're an adult. You've got big boy or big girl pants and you can make decisions about how you conduct yourself. Whatever your situation is, if you've accepted that input, that is now something you have to take care of in a responsible way. And if you have to spend eight hours a day doing email, then that's your job now. I don't know another way to slice that that's more kind or honest, but the truth is, if that's your job, well then something's got to change or you have to put on your resume that you're an email doer. That's the only way I know around it. So you talked about some of this research, so a woman at Microsoft years ago, Linda Stone, used to talk about something called email apnea where supposedly people will actually hold their breath when they're doing their email. Really? Being this very heightened state. Wow. I mean, just where you, like you said, you end up beating yourself up with what Buddhists call like you're the one who's tearing yourself apart about this stuff. You know, you're in battle and you get shot with an arrow, but then how do you feel and then how do you feel about how you feel? Because I do think there is kind of a meta level of cognition where most of the worst emotions, sort of the seven dwarfs of bad emotions that we walk around with are how we feel about how we feel, which sounds real woo-woo, but I find that to be very true because that's the part that you decided to add to this mixture. So how do you feel about your email now and how do you feel about how you feel about your email? Oh, it's so easy. It's so easy because I get less. People are terrified to email me. It would be awesome. Well, I did. If you remember, I tweeted at you first. I didn't email you because I didn't know how to find your email address. I mean, the system's working. Yeah. Let me put it to you this way. Your mail at home, right? You probably got a mailbox at home. Once a day, you get mail in there. Can you imagine going back to your mailbox when you already know what's in there and just looking at it all again? It's mental. You would never, I mean, what are you going to do? Are you a crazy person? Like, who would do that? You take out the bills, you recycle the junk, and you move on and you stop thinking about your mailbox. Amy? Amy? Amy? Amy Westervelt? Can you help me out here? I don't know. I don't. I also kind of like dislike this whole idea where people just act like sending an email is actually doing something, you know, to his point about if your job is doing email. I was chuckling about I feel like a lot of people get into that and pretty soon it's been like six hours where they're just responding to emails and they feel like they've done something, but they still have like their actual job to do after that. And I don't know. I feel like ever since I kind of stopped caring about email, I definitely feel much more productive. I like wrote a book and started a company in the same year and I swear to God a big part of it is just not doing email that much. That's that is awesome. I realize that a lot of people really do have to respond to particular types of people, you know, if it's a boss or whatever. And that I'm in a position where I sort of mostly work for myself, although it kind of also feels like I work for a hundred different people. So, you know, but I do. I don't know. I feel like if you set that precedent with people of like, oh, like, I have a couple of people that I interact with, for example, who only check their email like at two particular times a day. And so I know that if I don't hear back from them right away, it might be a day and that's fine. And I also know there are other ways to reach them more urgently if I need to. So I'm personally trying to work on being more of that type of person where like, it's not just that I ignore emails and I'm hard to reach. It's like, there are multiple different ways to reach me depending on what it is you're trying to accomplish. Could you do that? Could you just check your email, you know, a couple of times a day? I don't think I could. That's the thing is like, I get sucked in too much, I feel like, when I sometimes, you know, I just search my email. I don't even look at the first page of the inbox because I don't want to get dragged into something that is not on my list for the day. It's so interesting because I was looking at research. I wanted to try to understand like, you know, behavioral science behind email and, you know, what it says is like, huh, our brain is wired for novelty. So your brain is constantly excited and thrilled at the notion of checking email. There might be something new, but that there was this really interesting study where they took two different groups of people and one checked their email all the time as usual. And, you know, the research shows that sometimes we're just checking hundreds of times a day and I am probably guilty of that if I actually counted it up and the other, they were held to that two or three times a day and what they've found is that the people who checked their email fewer times were actually much less stressed out and much happier. So it sounds like... That tracks. That tracks. Yeah. So how do you, how do you do that? You know, sometimes I think, you know, when you talk about the time, you know, and the sort of the time suck and you get lost, probably one of my worst habits is so I always want to be checking and so I'll check and then I'll see that there's a bunch of stuff that I probably should respond to but I don't have the time or energy so I'll flag it and then it stays there because maybe I'm standing in the grocery store checkout line where I probably shouldn't be checking my emails but I am because I feel like I need to delete as many as I can and then I'll go, you know, so then it builds up and then I do. I have to go back. It's like I'm constantly putting my bills into freezer. You know, how do you deal with that? The sort of really practical way I deal with it is that I don't open my email on my computer when I'm doing other work and I leave my phone in the car if I'm like doing work or whatever because otherwise I will. It's very easy, right? To just like be in line waiting for something and like, see if anything's coming here. You know? It's not even just the time that it takes. It takes my focus away from the thing I was doing and then it takes me another like extra 10 minutes to regain that focus and it doesn't really deliver any value for wreaking all that havoc on my day. Sometimes I'll leave my phone in another room if I'm doing work or whatever too because even if I don't open the email on my computer I might be tempted to like grab my phone and look at it on there. You know? So yeah, I try to like outsmart myself. That was Amy Westervelt. She's a health, tech and business writer. Her work appears in The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal and Amy also wrote a book Forget Having It All How America Messed Up Motherhood and How to Fix It. Earlier we heard from Merlin Mann. He's a blogger, productivity guru, podcaster and to be honest a very good sport. Merlin co-hosts To Do Friday and Reconcilable Differences and way back in 2007 shortly after Steve Jobs introduced the very first iPhone Merlin Mann coined the term inbox zero. For more resources on working healthier including how to think differently about email and focus not on the inbox but on what's important visit us online at newamerica.org Click on the link for Better Life Lab. Better Life Lab is produced by New America in partnership with Slate. It's a collaboration with Ideas 42 supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The producer of Better Life Lab is David Schulman. Hailey Swinson provides our research assistance. Thanks so much for joining me for our podcast about the art and science of living a full and healthy life. From New America's Better Life Lab I'm Bridget Schulte.