Every few months, I declare war on the inbox.
Clear it down. File it. Archive the clutter. Get back to zero.
And for a day or two, it feels like victory. I’ve “caught up”. Nothing hanging over me. Nothing blinking. Nothing slipping through the cracks. But it never lasts. By the end of the week, it’s full again.
So I’ve started asking: what if the inbox is the symptom and not the actual problem?
The emails, the messages, the to-dos, they don’t appear out of nowhere. They’re requests for attention, generated by systems I’ve allowed to run unchecked. Systems that assume unlimited energy, constant presence, and no need for downtime.
And I’ve noticed something: whenever I start treating the inbox as a fire to fight, I stop questioning what’s fuelling the blaze.
- What meetings should never have happened.
- What responsibilities I accepted out of guilt, not capacity.
- What parts of myself I’ve outsourced to platforms that never sleep.
The inbox isn’t the enemy. It’s the interface to expectations you never consented to.
And maybe the answer isn’t inbox zero. Maybe it’s reducing the surface area of your availability, before the system collapses under its own volume.