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Some interpreted it to mean that every email deserved a reply, which only shackled them more firmly to their inboxes. Even when people did successfully implement Inbox Zero, it didn’t reliably bring calm. The better you get at managing time, the less of it you feel that you have.
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The archetypal Silicon Valley startup, in the last few years, has been one that promises to free up time and mental capacity by eliminating some irritating “friction” of daily life – shopping or laundry, or even eating, in the case of the sludgy, beige meal replacement Soylent – almost always for the purpose of doing more work.Īnd yet the truth is that more often than not, techniques designed to enhance one’s personal productivity seem to exacerbate the very anxieties they were meant to allay. There are blogs offering tips on productive dating, and on the potential result of productive dating, productive parenting signs have been spotted in American hotels wishing visitors a “productive stay”. Two books on the topic by the New York Times journalist Charles Duhigg have spent more than 60 weeks on the US bestseller lists between them, and the improbable titular promise of another book, The Four Hour Work Week, has seduced a reported 1.35m readers worldwide. The quest for increased personal productivity – for making the best possible use of your limited time – is a dominant motif of our age.
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There are now thousands of apps in the “productivity” category of the Apple app store, including software to simulate the ambient noise of working in a coffee shop (this has been shown, in psychology experiments, to help people focus on work), and a text editor that deletes the words you have written if you don’t keep typing fast enough.
And today, the personal productivity movement that Mann helped launch – which promises to ease the pain with time-management advice tailored to the era of smartphones and the internet – is flourishing as never before.
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Most of us have experienced this creeping sense of being overwhelmed: the feeling not merely that our lives are full of activity – that can be exhilarating – but that time is slipping out of our control. For the “knowledge workers” of the digital economy, it was both metaphor and delivery mechanism for the feeling that the pressure of trying to complete an ever-increasing number of tasks, in a finite quantity of time, was becoming impossible to bear. It functioned as a kind of infinite to-do list, to which anyone on the planet could add anything at will. If all this fervour seems extreme – Inbox Zero was just a set of technical instructions for handling email, after all – this was because email had become far more than a technical problem. Mann’s followers triumphantly posted screenshots of their empty inboxes the New Yorker, discerning his increasingly cult-like following, described his system as “halfway between Scientology and Zen”. It was the Atkins diet for nerds: if you weren’t doing it yourself, you almost certainly knew someone who was. Hundreds of thousands of people watched his talk online, and Inbox Zero spawned countless blog posts, along with books and apps. But he had stumbled on a rich seam of societal anxiety. “It was really just a way of saying, ‘I suck at email, and here’s stuff that makes me suck less at it – you may find it useful,’” Mann recalled later. Then close your inbox, and get on with living. Clarify the action each message requires – a reply, an entry on your to-do list, or just filing it away. Instead, Mann advised his audience that day at Google’s Silicon Valley campus, every time you visit your inbox, you should systematically “process to zero”.
Most of us get into bad habits with email: we check our messages every few minutes, read them and feel vaguely stressed about them, but take little or no action, so they pile up into an even more stress-inducing heap. He called his system “Inbox Zero”, and the basic idea was simple enough. And Mann, a rising star of the “personal productivity” movement, seemed like he might have found the answer.
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Their biggest professional problem was email, the digital blight that was colonising more and more of their hours, squeezing out time for more important work, or for having a life. T he eternal human struggle to live meaningfully in the face of inevitable death entered its newest phase one Monday in the summer of 2007, when employees of Google gathered to hear a talk by a writer and self-avowed geek named Merlin Mann.
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