Issue 59: Are Inboxes Evil?

If you want to make a knowledge worker instinctually tense up, a good place to start is by reminding them of their (likely overflowing) inbox.

"Inbox" has become a bad word of sorts, something that one mustn't bring up in polite conversation. An inbox is a reminder of work undone, obligations unfulfilled, a miasma of past, present, and future stressors.

On the face of it these features are genuinely helpful, or at worst, inert. In theory, being able to reply to a message later frees us to stay focused on our current task. And in theory, having a priority queue enabled in our system allows us to filter out noise, and only focus on high ROI communication.

In practice, an inbox is an obligation. An inbox is an obligation – ironically – because of the features that make a queue useful. The asynchronous information allows senders to barrage an inbox while having no frame of reference whether their receiver is overloaded. The priority list ranks back-and-forth conversations aggressively, leading to multiple threads of email hot potato taking up the top spots in the queue.

In practice, the email inbox is a system where the more effort you put in, the more work arrives later. In other words, the better you are at email, the more email you are expected to answer. Sucks, right?

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