Transcript
Merlin Mann (0:00)
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.
Mark Stedman (0:05)
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.
Merlin Mann (2:19)
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.
Mark Stedman (2:43)
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.