PLAIN TEXT. PAPER, LESS · 172

Three Decades of Email Clutter. Three Folders. One Life Changed.

How one messy person learned to love an empty inbox

Image by the Author. I have multiple inboxes because my husband and I share an account.

Non-Medium members can read this post on my blog.

This is the story of how I learned to do a scary, seemingly impossible productivity thing. A thing I once thought could only be mastered by people who live in pristine, minimalist environments; all clean lines of chrome and black with daring pops of red. People who are Not Me!

The thing of which I speak has been known since 2007 as Inbox Zero¹. It’s the pinnacle you reach when all your emails have been acted on, archived, or trashed, leaving the inbox completely empty.

Inbox Zero is a mountain I never thought I needed to climb. Now that I’m there (in all my loosely-organised plain text splendour), it’s peaceful. It’s satisfying. It feels like home, at last.

I’m going to tell you how I got there (even though I’m still rather messy), and how you can, too. If you truly want to master your email, to achieve the once-elusive Inbox Zero, it’s yours for the taking.

In the beginning were the words, and the words did multiply exceedingly