Every now and then I'll watch a productivity video or read an article about Inbox Zero.
The advice is always the same:
read the email, reply if needed, archive it.
And every time I have the same thought: why?
I'm not against organising things. If anything, I'm probably too organised. My dotfiles are version controlled, I like clean abstractions, and I enjoy removing unnecessary complexity. Which is exactly why I don't archive my email.
My inbox currently has around 20,000 emails. Almost all of them are read. My unread count is usually zero. People see that number and assume my inbox must be chaos. To me, it's the opposite.
I only care about three states.
Unread
This means I haven't dealt with it yet. It's my work queue.
Starred
This means I want quick access to it. Sometimes that's temporary - a package I'm tracking or an event I'm waiting for. Sometimes it's permanent - a software licence, a warranty, or an important receipt. There are usually fewer than twenty starred emails.
Read
Done. That's it. No folders. No archive. No decision about where it belongs.
I realised something one day. I wasn't organising my email. I was organising my attention. Those are two completely different problems.
Whether an email lives in "Inbox" or "All Mail" makes absolutely no difference to me. What matters is whether I've processed it. Once it's read, it disappears from my mental model.
On my phone, I rarely even look at the full inbox. In Apple Mail, I almost always switch to the Unread filter. That's my real inbox. Everything else is just storage.
When I'm done with an email, I mark it as read. If I still need it, I star it. Otherwise I forget it exists. If I ever need to see it again, I know a quick search will find it.
Archiving feels like an extra step. For my workflow, archiving changes location but not behaviour. The email is still searchable. It's still part of the same conversation. It's still there when I need it. The only thing that changed is that it no longer has the Inbox label. Since I don't use the Inbox as my task list anyway, removing that label doesn't buy me anything.
This isn't a productivity hack. I'm not claiming everyone should do this. If you receive hundreds of emails a day and like your inbox to show only active conversations, archiving makes perfect sense. If folders help you think, use folders.
The point isn't that my workflow is better. It's that I stopped following advice that solved a problem I didn't have. As an engineer, I think about it like this: why introduce another state if it doesn't change the outcome?
My email has exactly three meaningful states:
- Needs attention
- Keep handy
- Done
Everything else is handled by Gmail's search.
Maybe that's why this system has worked for me for years. Or maybe, I'm just lazy.