Am I addicted to Inbox Zero?

Sam Davies
Jul 25, 2017 · 4 min read

Hi My name is Sam Davies and I am an Email Addict.

I have been preaching about and practising Inbox Zero since around 2009. I am good at it. I action my inbox (and outbox) on a daily cycle. I rarely go to bed with anything sitting in my inbox. I either reply, delegate or file on my Trello/Jira boards. It is a solid system. The problem is, I am a slave to it.

I have the week off this week and Tess my 2IC at Digital Noir challenged me not to check my email for a week. I literally felt physically anxious at the thought. I run my own business so I feel very obliged to be on call and email is my main point of contact. I protested, “ I won’t respond I said, I will just continue to action.”

She said I have email OCD and that it was

  1. Not going to kill me
  2. Not an issue as we have the staff and SOP’s in place to allow the business to run without me checking my email every day (more like every 10 minutes).

When Merlin Man first talked about Inbox Zero, he was advocating the process of removing email from being a driving factor in your work life. To not allow it to dictate your To-Do list and to stop it from getting in the way of Getting Shit Done. It has helped me and many others in the more macro challenge of prioritizing our busy task lists and working in bite size chunks. But Merlin talked about checking email on a bi-weekly basis or even less….

I check and purge my inbox at least 30 times a day. At 4:40am I wake up and quickly delete the spam from through the night, I check for any late updates from clients or important emails from overseas. Then again on the train at 6:30am I run another purge. 8:00am I begin to get emails from clients and start replying or delegating. 9:30 I will have at least 5 new emails to respond or file and a long list that I need to write. This continues until around 10pm when I do my final purge and generally try and go to sleep with an empty inbox.

Just writing that down makes me start to see that perhaps I am letting my supposedly healthy and organised email habits become something slightly more worrying. My argument to Tess (and myself) is that I do receive urgent emails from clients that are not CC’d on a daily basis. We pride ourselves on ‘Old School Service’ and my career as a freelancer as instilled in me an extremely ‘reactive’ approach when dealing with client services. But I now run a company with 10 full time staff and contractors and dozens of clients. Perhaps my time is not best spent, distracting myself every 45 minutes with a fresh feed of issues, leads, distractions.

In my quest to work smarter (see my quest to integrate the 80/20 rule) am I perhaps using Inbox Zero as a crux for ‘busy work’. It is getting in the way of getting more important things done. Could I get away with perhaps only checking 3 times a day. Once in the morning, at lunch and before I clock off? Something that came up in my chat with Tess was that I do not have a personal email. I have not had a personal email since 2007. YES, Digital Noir is MY business. But do I need to start creating more distinction between my life in the studio and the rest of my existence. I think the answer is self evident.

I do not want to be a hypocrite. My strong adoption of Inbox Zero came from a place of wanting to be a smart business owner that didn’t fall trap to a life of desk enslavement. I am a strong believer in self destination — I do not want external things controlling me. I am my own boss at work and in life. So perhaps reducing my addiction is necessary. Email will always be an essential tool for my business but the way I manage it can be improved. So I have deleted Gmail from my phone and closed my persistent sticky tab on my browser. There’s no way I can can go a week, but I will give it 36 hours and trust that the world has not exploded while I am gone!

How do you deal with email in your work life? I would love to know!

If you liked what I had to say, click the ♥ to share it with everyone else, or better yet comment and let me know what your thoughts are.

Sam has been running a Digital Agency in some form or another for almost a decade. He loves the internet and the positive changes it has brought to the world but still loves time away from the glowing cubes. Surf, Fish, Drink, Cook, Laugh….Drink! You can find me all over the net.

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Sam Davies

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Brief excerpts from the frontlines by an accidental businessman. Owner www.digitalnoir.com.au

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