Illustration by The Globe and Mail. Sources: Getty Images
It was 2011 when I last wrote about inbox zero – the mythical emptied inbox, each e-mail read, replied to, sorted or trashed.
I was on the cusp myself, with just 49 e-mails left to deal with.
They were simpler times. As of this week, 1,281 e-mails sit like dead weight in my inbox. Untold thousands more lurk inside an armada of folders I’ve set up over nearly two decades in the newsroom.
Somehow, I’ve learned to ignore the burden of my inbox.
For those unwilling to live with this kind of mess, there is Empty, a series of digital decluttering parties designed to help people face the tedium of emptying their inboxes, together. Running early in the new year and in the first days of spring, the virtual parties harness people’s momentum in these annual phases of resolve and renewal.
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Much like admin parties where people hang out and do their taxes or paperwork together, Empty helps people deal with e-mail overwhelm – old messages piling up unanswered, a constant stream of new requests flowing in.
The Globe and Mail spoke with Coral Short, Empty’s founder and a somatic experiencing practitioner in Montreal, about spring-cleaning the inbox.
What gave you the idea to host these e-mail cleanup events?
I started getting these scary, red notices from Gmail: “You are at your limit.” I thought, I’m not paying Google for more space.
Some friends had tens of thousands of e-mails. It can be overwhelming to do that kind of work alone. I’m seeing more people coming together to deal with admin.
What’s the appeal of doing it together?
Being alone doing e-mail, there’s isolation and also some guilt and shame in there. There’s a lot of anxiety in this age of technology – it’s a new knowing of stress.
The idea of coming together and being with other people doing the same thing is very relieving. With the events, there’s a collective focus. We’re riding each other’s successes. There’s humour in the encouragement and pep talks.
How do your digital cleaning parties work?
When people come, they put their number of e-mails underneath their name. The numbers are very high; there’s nobody under 1,000 e-mails. People don’t have to feel bad about having a high number.
Then every hour, we update the numbers to see how many e-mails are gone. We get that dopamine hit of, “We’re getting somewhere.”
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Walk me through the digital hygiene tips people exchange.
The first thing is to unsubscribe from mailing lists, or else they just keep coming. People will learn how to filter, use folders, archive or put e-mails into tasks. Everybody has their own way to do it; we don’t boss anyone around.
How do people feel, sorting out this part of their lives?
It feels amazing. You feel lighter in your body, mind and heart. There are people who make it part of their life to come and clean out with us.
There’s a lot of emotionality. Some people will leave a job and delete everything from that job. People will find e-mails from exes, from dead people.
Fifteen years ago I interviewed Merlin Mann, a writer who popularized the concept of inbox zero. He came to see that e-mail is like rain – you can’t stop it. Do people still aspire to inbox zero, since it’s only temporary?
We’ve let go of the idea of the perfection of inbox zero. We’re just heading toward that, but I don’t think anyone expects to get there.
Sometimes people will come to a January event and they’ll continue afterward. They’ll be relentless, taking out 50 to 100 e-mails a day. They’ll write to us in March and say, “Okay, I got to zero.”
I did know someone who just deleted their entire inbox. They were an older person and they couldn’t deal with the stress of this any more. Kudos to them.
I quit my smartphone for two weeks to see if I’d have a better life
Back in 2011, TED Talks curator Chris Anderson drafted the Email Charter, etiquette rules for e-mail. He blasted people for wasting others’ time with poor form in the inbox. Fifteen years later, are we any better at e-mail?
One thing that’s really changed is “schedule send.” I schedule send work stuff for Monday, so people can rest on the weekend.
E-mails are also becoming simpler, getting straight to the point. They’re becoming more like text messages. Remember when e-mail started and they were ginormous letters?
I recently saw this technology, Fyxer: AI comes into your inbox, writes back to every e-mail, and puts it in your draft folder so it’s ready for you to fix up and humanize. I wonder if our event is going to be obsolete one day because everyone will have AI handling their e-mail.
Much like with AI, there were hopes that e-mail would save us time. Now, researcher Gloria Mark finds we check e-mail 74 times a day. And you’re hosting a five-hour session on a Sunday to help people clean out their inboxes. What do you make of the false promise of e-mail as a time-saver?
I think if we had a choice, we wouldn’t be on screens so much. Still, there is something beautiful about e-mail, and now Signal and WhatsApp – the way we can keep in touch with each other. As a Gen Xer, that wasn’t always possible.
I’ve come across unread e-mails and realized, “That was a beautiful opportunity I missed.” That’s why I do this project, so I don’t miss e-mails like that.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
The next Empty event is Sunday, March 29. For future sessions, follow @coralshort on Instagram.
