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- [00:00]
Merlin Mann
I think you can get so wound up in this one thing you're supposed to be feeling bad about that you lose a lot of opportunities.
- [00:06]
Mark Stedman
It's January 2011, and Merlin Mann has a deadline. This is him on episode one of the Back to Work podcast. That show petered out last year when his co host apparently stopped talking to him. But this first episode is so bright and full of potential. But Merlin has a deadline for a book about managing email. It has an ISBN and a subtitle and an author bio and a contract and an editor. A month later, he flies to New Zealand to give the closing talk at a technology conference. He talks about fear. More specifically, being scared shitless. He talks emotionally about his dad and his divorce. He's cocky, charismatic and comical. But it was all kind of put together at the last minute because he has this deadline. Two months later, he writes about his young daughter and how travel and work are getting in the way of more memories being created between them. Turns out this deadline was months ago, and Merlin still hasn't delivered his book about email. He still hasn't. Nowadays, you can look up Inbox Zero, the method he introduced to the world in 2007, and you could dive down a whole rabbit hole without ever coming across Merlin Mann. Today we're going to talk about Inbox Zero. It's actually a pretty good way of organizing your email. But behind the system is a dude who stepped off the hamster wheel of productivity, got some perspective, and became one of the Internet's true treasures. I'm Mark Stedman and this is undo, investigating productivity methods through the ages and the outliers who discovered them. Before we crack on and talk about email, I want to make the point that Merlin Mann is very much a thriving personality on the web. He hasn't slinked away to lick any imaginary wounds. He has about a million different podcasts and blogs. And if he ever hears this episode, he won't thank me for it. Not many people like to be seen in the way this particular show sees people. I, for one, can relate. All right, so enough fart sniffing. Let's talk about email.
- [02:19]
Merlin Mann
A lot of people right now are, for practical purposes, living in their inbox. They leave their email open all day long. It's auto checking throughout the day. Little blips come up about every minute. And email becomes the nexus for everything they do with work. They use it as a to do list manager. They use it as a calendar. I'm not talking about Outlook. I'm talking about people who, like, literally scroll through their inbox to decide what meetings they have to go through today.
- [02:43]
Mark Stedman
Merlin man has had a lot of jobs and yeah, okay, if it's the first time you've heard his name, yes, it's Merlin, like the magician, because the name is Welsh. And incidentally, King Arthur is a Welsh mythology, so I think it has less to do with a wizard and more to do with the country. I can't imagine you grow up normal when your name is Merlin. But this isn't the Nominative Determinism podcast, so I'll leave such idle speculation to a show with a bigger budget. So I was telling you about Merlin's jobs. Over the years he's been a musician, a front end coder, a blogger, a keynote speaker, and a podcaster. Incidentally, when I discovered some years back that Merlin had a band called Bacon Ray, I thought, I reckon I know what that music sounds like. I couldn't have been writer anyway. In 2004, Mann started a blog called 43 Folders where he wrote about the stuff we now probably put into the bucket of productivity. Over the years he'd write more about email, and in the summer of 2007 he was asked to deliver a talk at Google, who were so buried in email that it was stopping them from getting their real work done. Inbox zero became as patron saint of the podcast. Oliver Berkman described it the Atkins Diet for Nerds. And incidentally, if you're playing the undo drinking game, I just invoked Berkman's name, so you have to empty a glass. Suffice it to say, the idea exploded. The New York Post called it part of a wave of minimalism that sprang up about a decade ago. You know, the whole joy of missing out, life changing power of tidying up or whatever. That's probably why I really like snooker. As the comedian John Richardson puts it, it's essentially just tidying up turned into a pub game. The point of Inbox zero is to make email as small a part of your life as possible, to treat it a little like sewerage, clear the backlog and then keep pumping it away from you as fast and efficiently as possible. That's my definition and the email community is welcome to it. So how do it work? Well, the first thing we need to do is clear our inbox. There's no timeline at the present, so let's start now. Create a new folder and give it a name like dmz, or DMZ if you prefer, and drag everything from your inbox into that folder. If you're super brave, open the folder and archive anything older than 21 days. Chances are, if it's important to someone else, someone's going to badge you about it later. And if it's important to you, it should live somewhere outside of your inbox. Don't worry, we'll come back to that folder in due course. Now, if you're too young or attractive to have played those point and click adventure games like Monkey island or Day of the Tentacle, you have my sympathies. But if you were around in the 90s, maybe you played one or two of those games. If so, this idea will be familiar to you. You have an object like a bowling ball, and you have a number of things you can do to or with that ball. These are usually things like pick up, put down, push, pull, or what have you. Inbox zero essentially takes a point and click adventure game approach to email. So whenever a new message lands in your inbox, you'll take one of five actions. Throw it away, delegate it to someone else, respond now, defer it till later, or take action on it. Let's go through these in a bit more detail. First off, throw it away. This is pretty simple. I'm probably a bit of an email hoarder, but I'm I draw the line at receipts for repeat purchases, support tickets, calendar invites, and the like. They live elsewhere on the Internet, so being anywhere in your email system adds no value and just eats into your storage quota. If you know you don't need it, delete it now. Gmail has an action called Archive. Just like Delete, it gets the message out of your way. But unlike delete archived items don't self destruct after 30 days. If you're sure you're going to need that new email that's come in, archive it. Otherwise bin it.
- [06:50]
Merlin Mann
And what is archiving? Archiving for me is a single folder. It is not 24 folders. It's not coming up with the most crazy byzantine taxonomically complete system that you can think of. Because be honest, for those of you who do have the 24 folder byzantine system, when's the last time you used it to actually find anything? Ask yourself what is the minimally Byzantine system that you can tolerate that will still allow you to find stuff later on does not need to be taxonomically satisfying, it needs to be easy to find.
- [07:17]
Mark Stedman
Not going to lie, I feel, as the kids say, seen. I've historically been a serial organizer of emails with lots of lovely nested folders. But Merlin's right, if there's anything you really need, you can Search your archive for it. Plus, the important thing to remember here is that email isn't the thing. It's just a record of the thing. It's not the appointment you need to keep or the new logo design you have to approve, or the master of the track you're collaborating on. It's just the envelope the thing came in. Speaking of envelopes, an erstwhile colleague of mine used to talk about how Word documents were basically the envelopes of the Internet. Most people, it turns out, don't know how to send screenshots or logos to people, so they put them inside Word documents because they know how they work and send those word docs over email. People should really be taught how to use computers. Anyway, the point is, delete your emails. At least the ones you definitely don't need. Okay, next up, delegate it. If you don't have all the stuff you need to act on a new email that's come in, who does? Get it off your plate as soon as possible and onto someone else's. But don't be a dick about it. And don't toss emails back and forth like a hot potato. Cal Newport, the deep work guy, makes the point that it's a lot quicker to have a synchronous conversation with someone, but we seem to rarely be up for that. Honestly, think of a number of awkward and spiky email exchanges you've had with people. That would be so much smoother if you'd just picked up the phone, spoken for two minutes and gone, oh, shit. That's what you mean, oh, cool, Yeah, I can do that. The ruthless version of this tactic is it. If you can make this email someone else's problem, do that. As long as you're not just delaying the inevitable. Some people will just bat an email back and forth and ask for some clarification simply so that they can get the thing off their desk. Don't be that person. But similarly, don't be afraid to throw it to someone else if they can help you clear a blockage. The third thing you can do with an email is respond. And here I have to applaud Merlin for For not trying to come up with another D word just so he had a funky mnemonic. If there's one thing Merlin has never considered himself, it's a thought leader. And crowbarring in a particular word so it fits a mnemonic is prime thought leader bullshit. Anyway, if you can reply to a message in a couple of minutes, do so now. This is straight out of Getting Things Done by David Allen, and you better believe it's going to be the subject of a future episode. I know what I'm about, son. There's a neat little idea that can help with this too. You'll never believe this listener, but I have something of a reputation for being somewhat verbose. I know, and that absolutely extends to my email as well. But along with the prior art of David Allen's GTD framework, Merlin also cites a teeny idea called five Sentences, which is a commitment to replying to emails in five sentences or fewer. I reckon it's worth a try, and I suspect the universe will thank you. Okay, so far we've got archiving, delegating and replying. What else can we do with email? Well, we can deal with it now or defer it later. This is probably the thing you'll do most often, and it means bringing in another system. Your to do list. Whether you're a digital GTD fanatic, a time blocker, or a daily pen and paper person, hopefully you you've got a way of tracking the stuff you're supposed to be doing. And roughly when when an email lands in your inbox that needs you to do a particular thing. If that thing will take you less than five minutes, do it now. Reply to the email if you need to, and yeet that email into the sea. If it's going to take longer, stick it on your to do list. If you use an app to keep track of your tasks, you can copy the link to the email in Gmail and paste it in the Notes Notes field of your task. That way you don't have to search for it later. That's essentially the system delete, delegate, reply, defer or do. Which is all well and good for new emails, but what about that DMZ folder? Well, that's where you might want to pour yourself a nice stiff drink and dive in. Let's do that after this brief interruption. Foreign we'll get back to the show in 30 seconds. I just wanted to let you know that Undo plus is now open for business. When you become an Undo plus member, you get access to your own private podcast feed where you can pick my brains, join a Discord community with other listeners, and show your support for the show. Your money goes directly into making the show better. So if you enjoy Undo and you'd like a little bit more of it, you can head to undo FM plus plus. That's undo FM plus. Ooh, bang on. 30 seconds. So you know how to deal with new messages as they come in. But what about that DMZ folder you set up. Well, you want to do the same thing there, which is why it's probably a good idea to archive anything older than a month. Unless you're able to give everything a quick cursory glance to check, it's not going to catch on fire if you don't reply. I declare bankruptcy. Back in the day there used to be a podcast called Reply all which cottoned onto a pre existing idea of the email debt forgiveness day. Declaring email bankruptcy might get you in trouble at work, but I mean, no one's gonna know if you don't tell them. Who's to say you didn't have some sort of major tech issue the day Janet sent that email? She wants to bump back to the top of your inbox Just saying. Like I said earlier, this methodology exploded and gained almost cult like status. And because I guess Merlin isn't the type to stick a trademark symbol on everything he creates, you can now buy books like 21 Days to Inbox 0 that are based on this method but are written by other people. One assumes they kick back some royalties to Merlin, no? Well, that aside, Inbox Zero has become such a facet of email culture that lots of apps do a little celebratory dance when you clear your inbox. My desktop email app even has a little burst of confetti and proudly proclaims Inbox Zero in large friendly letters. But not everyone thought it was a neat idea, and some question whether it's even a healthy idea, let alone a workable one.
- [13:51]
Merlin Mann
Studies show that it takes an undue amount of time to return to whatever you were doing when you take time out to read some usually unnecessary and unsolicited email, delete it, and redirect your mind to where it was before. One study cited in a story about how some of us may just be more attached to our techno identities than others, quoted a researcher who studied distraction in email. When someone drops everything just to get an unread count, back to zero. Productivity might be taking a hit. It takes people on average about 25 minutes to to reorient back to a task when they get interrupted.
- [14:26]
Mark Stedman
A researcher says this comes from Sara Stewart's takedown of the Inbox Zero method. In fact, she calls it bullshit. It's a little performative. But she does make the point I made a little earlier that if you're deleting something important, someone is going to follow up. So really, why do we need a system? Well, and this is me editorializing here, why do we need anything? You know, some People like to know they've got a handle on their correspond. Some take that obligation more seriously than others, and some get buried in it. I don't know if you remember, but around the time Merlin was kicking around his Inbox Zero method, Ringo Starr was quitting Fan mail. I'm warning you with peace and love, but I have too much to do, so no more fan mail. Thank you, thank you. And no objects to be signed. Nothing. Anyway, peace and love. Peace and love. And the thing is, Merlin himself has admitted it's pretty tricky to really get on top of your email. He describes it as a people problem, not a tech problem. And you can't fix people, which kind of underscores a point I made a couple of weeks ago. Sure, we can implement systems, but we're chaotic organic beings filled with bacteria that wriggle around and move unpredictably. Some days you're smashing through tasks like a demon, and other days you just want to sit on the sofa and listen to the audiobook of the Martian. It's really good, by the way. I highly recommend it, both the sofa and the book the penultimate post on Merlin's 43 Folders blog is heartbreaking. I wasn't in Merlin's head at the time, but given the final post was just a recommendation of a friend's app, I could smell the acrid stench of burnout. Cal Newport said that writing the book on Inbox Zero, a book that was, as I said, commissioned and has an ISBN, but which never materialized, broke man and his relationship to productivity. I don't know about that, but I do know the meta world of Inbox Zero isn't as neat and tidy as others because it was made by a human, and humans be messy. Productivity isn't the destination or even the boat that gets us there. It's the mechanism inside the motor that powers the boat. If we're just using the boat to get somewhere and we spend all of our time fiddling with the motor, we lose sight of where we're going and maybe even why we're going there in the first place. And if you're not careful, you take yourself wildly off course. Productivity is about people, the time we spend with them, and the things we can make when we learn from or collaborate with them. On that note, I'll give the last word to Merlin.
- [17:17]
Merlin Mann
You know, you sit around, you go, oh, I hope people like me, and I hope they friend me, and I hope they do all this superficial stuff that doesn't cost anything. But what you really want is to, like, not suck enough that people you really admire wouldn't mind doing something with you. And if that sounds like nonsense, then like just, you know, change the channel in your mom's basement. Because that's the thing. The whole thing is getting to where even I'm not saying you've got to go and like you get to go work with George Clooney or something, which I would really enjoy. But you know, just getting the opportunity to have yourself and your work improved by proximity to people who are better at what you do.
- [17:57]
Mark Stedman
Undo is written and produced by me, Mark Stedman. You heard real clips from Merlin Mann, Steve Carell and Ringo Starr, and AI generated ones from the rest. You can find links to just about everything I mentioned at Undo FM Inbox. That's also where you can sign up to let me deliver you from the blissful state of Inbox Zero every Monday with my email newsletter. You lucky devil. Merlin, if you're listening, I hope I didn't disappoint you with this episode. I don't think I could take that. Stick around if you want to know how I'm trying to make this methodology work and where I'm falling over with it. Otherwise, if you're leaving us here to catch another podcast, I wish you a pleasant onward journey and I hope to see you again next week when we'll talk timeboxing. Just before we move on, I got this review for the show recently by Mum from Ohio. It reads, the content can be interesting, but his political comments are distracting and insulting. I am sure he thinks he is witty, but we would all be better off without snide comments on unrelated topics. I am not listening for political hot takes. Now I find this really disappointing because it reads much more like a one star review, but she actually gave the podcast two. If you were as bothered by this show as Mum from Ohio, do please leave a one star review. I put up all my favorite reviews on the website, this included and right now it's looking embarrassingly positive. Anyway, your reviews are always welcome, so thank you and now let's you and I get in the shed. Woof. Well, that was. That was a real lot of fun to put together that episode. So you join me for a bit of shed time to talk about not only my love for Merlin man, my affection for him I should say, but also how I'm trying to work the whole inbox zero thing. So first off, I think I heard about inbox zero in something like 2008. I had a mate. I bet you have this. You know someone who always Seems to be up on the stuff, like the latest thing, whether it's music or tech or whatever. He introduced me to Twitter and oh, and a bloggers meet where I actually met some of my now best friends. I actually owe quite a lot to this guy. And I'm pretty sure Inbox zero was something that he, he mentioned to me back in those early days. I didn't really do much with it. And then a few years later, I came across the Back to Work podcast and listened to a couple of episodes. Couldn't really sort of get what it was. Didn't really. It wasn't really sort of in that productivity mindset, I guess. But I came back to it maybe eight years ago and dived into a whole bunch of other Merlin man stuff. And yeah, he's. He's a. He's an interesting sort, I think a complex human being, but one that I have a great amount of affection for because. Partly because he's very human and you know, can. Can often be open. Not a complete open book. He doesn't display himself open, but he can write beautifully about the things that he's thinking about and the things that he cares about. And he, I think, revels, and I was gonna say revels in sharing, but I think needs to share stuff, whether it's music that he's loving or clips of things. I don't really follow him on social media because I find it a bit distracting because he loves to just like throw stuff out and go, this is something I'm enjoying right now. Or here's a reference to something. And I think there are, there are fans of Merlin's who really enjoy that. So if you've whatever reason picked up this episode because you are a Merlin acolyte, then I hope I've done Inbox Zero and Merlin himself some kind of level of justice. Okay, that's enough of that. So the method itself, I actually started working on it this week. I just thought, you know what? I'm going to do the same thing. I did the DMZ thing. I had a couple of folders that I was like, I need to kind of keep an eye on these things here. So I think I've got one folder that's sort of my equivalent of the dmz. It was for like new business type things that I need to remind myself to check back on. But everything else now it's. It's just in the archive, I used to have folders upon folders upon folders, nested folders of all sorts of stuff. And actually the Amount of time I wasted on the sofa using the inbuilt iOS mail app to categorize an email that came in. Is it about this particular project? Yes, it is. And then I've got to find that folder by scrolling endlessly. Like why? Because yeah, I could a later date click into that folder and know exactly where it, where that email was. But we also have search and I think part of this issue is, is we use email as something more than just passing notes to each other, which is really what it is. We, we use it as a record and it, you know, yes, it is a record, but, but really if there's things that the email is asking us to do, the doing of those things should really be tracked somewhere else. You know, ideally as soon as the email comes in or whenever your designated time to check is. And it's funny, in his talk, I think he talks about the one he did for Google. I think he talks about checking email like once an hour or something. And nowadays there is such a move to like, maybe you do that twice a day, you know, maybe that's your maximum. Like a lot of people are just like, we do this twice a day, you know, sort of maybe once at 11, once at 4 sort of thing. And I'm not quite there yet, but I'd like to be. I've got a lot better at when I'm in focus mode, when I'm really heads down on something, the email app gets closed because there shouldn't really be anything in my life that can't wait 20 minutes. If there is, then we need a different system. And that's, and that's the thing, isn't it? You know, most of us are not doing work that something is going to get result, you know, raised and resolved within a 25 minute period. So, you know, we can close our emails and probably just check it occasionally. So that's, that's the thought there. So I now have about four emails in my inbox. I do periodically reach inbox zero, but I've got about four. And it's just because I haven't sat down and done categorization yet. And that's the thing, it's just there doesn't always seem to be the right time. And I think part of what this method needs you to do is actually sit and go. This is dedicated email processing time. This is not just, I've got five minutes. I think you actually sometimes need to spend maybe 10 minutes, maybe a little bit more, depending on your volume of email, going through it and just making sure, you've read the thing, you understand it. And this is a key thing for me is sometimes I tend to glance over emails and I'm like, yeah, get the gist. But actually I've missed something crucial and, you know, lots of us do that. So, you know, taking the time to actually process stuff and then put it in a system that is designed for you to process work, you know, a To do list, a note app, you know, whatever it's going to be that is actually designed to help you work on. This is what I'm supposed to be doing today. This is one of my priorities. Let's get this thing out the door. And like I'd sort of mentioned in the, in the main piece, there are ways that you can link to a particular email. It's easier in some apps and some methodologies than others, and that's why I didn't really go into the full thing. But it is possible to effectively reference an email in your to do list, even if you just took the subject line and copied it so that then you can search for it later. You know, there's always a way that in your to do app you can directly reference the email so you can go back to it because it's still in your archive as long as you are using your to do list to actually get the work scheduled. Yeah, that's the point. So there you go. Listen, thank you. We will. I'll join you for obviously full episode next week, plus a bit of time in the shed. And yeah, we're going to talk about timeboxing, which is something that I've actually been practicing for quite a while and find really quite rewarding and useful. Especially as someone who has lots of commitments he needs to meet every week, lots of deadlines that need to be met every week. It's a really good way of just making sure that if something needs to be delivered on a Tuesday, it's delivered on a Tuesday, because that's the time that's been blocked into the calendar. It's kind of as simple as that. We'll discover whether I end up making a whole 20 minute episode about it. But now you've actually got the gist. All right, listen, thank you. I'll let you go have a wonderful rest of your week and we'll chat again next Monday.