I've always been fascinated by people who seem to have this problem. I've heard multiple individuals describe responding to emails as an infinite attention suck sort of like doomscrolling. For me, email is 99% updates/promotions, 0.99% real humans that I can hit with a one liner, and 0.01% humans that really require a thoughtful response. Something must happen to these email people where they grow prominent enough and advertise their address enough that they get inundated with genuine email that is all from thoughtful humans? Feels like a problem I would enjoy having, at least for a while.

> Many people have suggested strategies for dealing with this. One popular technique is Inbox Zero. The jokes about it suggests virtually nobody attains it, but I’m not even convinced it’s a virtue

I have inbox zero for personal and work emails. I can’t imagine living any other way.

I follow the mantra "Inbox <20". Inbox 0 is not flexible enough and freestyle Inbox is not manageable in the long term.

Together with filters, freely reporting as spam/unsubscribing, my Inbox <20 becomes a sort of todo list which I can review and handle whenever needed (this include flight/hotel bookings, getting back to complex emails, etc.).

My inbox at work is an ever-growing TODO list, only it's one that is written by other people. And my "Sent" folder is a list of people I need to "chase" to make sure they did what I asked them to do. I feel like this can take up as much of your work day as you let it: Getting to 10% of the things other people want me to do and nagging people who are, themselves, doing 10% of the things others are asking them to do.

For me, the entire inbox is this DBTC folder. I have notifications set up on my smartwatch and I triage each email in real-time as it comes in. If it's urgent, I act on it. If it is important or I want to follow up, then I add it to my (separate) to-do list, with a Google tasks voice command. And otherwise I just ignore the notification and the email sits there in the inbox until I feel like dealing with it. I use the unread status and pick things off in occasional focus sessions. Some things never get "read", and that's because they don't matter. Zero bandit stuff because I know exactly what's in my inbox at any given time, at least up to what my analog brain can hold. It fits right into the old "I heard a noise. What is it?" routine humans used when we were hunter-gatherers.

I've realised a few things dealing with time and attention, and devised a few strategies with varying degrees of success:

- Information consumes attention (as has been long observed).

- Corollary: excess information demands fast, cheap, regret-free rejection mechanisms. TFA describes several such approaches. The "DBTC" folder is one, but specifically refusing to use other, unmanageable, message queues (Twitter, FB, Slack, etc.) would be others. If a tool refuses to respect your boundaries, reject that tool.

- Time-blocking for low-urgency, but still significant tasks is useful. You're shifting from interrupt-driven mode to scheduled flow. This also means you can assess how your schedule relates to the incoming message flow, and whether or not that flow still exceeds your (now far more readily quantifiable) time devoted to it.

- There's still the question of how to prioritise items you're responding to. I'd suggest a rough triage method of:

1. Identifying high-priority senders (immediate family, work (management, colleagues, business relations), friends/social, and pretty much all else.

2. Randomly selecting from lower-priority queues is a way of fairly distributing your attention. If you can't do everything, sample a handful of items.

3. Quick "no"s (and learning how to phrase these delicately, if necessary) are useful. In some cases you might point the correspondent in a more useful direction. There's the physics professor's tactic of dealing with crackpot questions by directing them to one another, which preserves both attention and sanity....

My first exposure to the correspondence-limits problem came in one of the SF author Arthur C. Clarke's essay collections published in the 1970s or 1980s, in which he wrote of having had to resort to the tactic of responding to most of his own voluminous postal mail correspondence (and that international postal mail, for the most part, as he lived in Sri Lanka whilst most of his correspondents were elsewhere) with a pre-printed post-card with a set of checkboxes which answered most common inquiries. He'd already considered two further options: "Mr. Clarke regrets", and silence.

The future was not evenly distributed.

Email is an ignorable communication medium. It has lost relevance due to its ubiquity, which led to its overuse, which led to its redundancy.

There are a lot of stragglers that haven't realized it's redundancy yet, and madly spend a significant percentage of their time and effort organizing this pulsating mass of ever-changing chaos.

If you keep replying, they'll keep asking.

Cut it down to a quick squizz once a day and get in with the actual productive work.

(My experience written as universal. I'm aware there are some important emails - but I challenge that there aren't as many as you think there are)

Edited to add: you can only work on one thing at a time. It should always be the highest priority item. If something comes in via email, there's little to no likelihood that it should be jumping to the top of the pile (email is not a real-time communication platform, and people who think it is should be corrected). An email is like the first pangs of hunger: at least 24 hours from becoming important.