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.
But why is this the case? Are inboxes deserving of their bad reputation?
An inbox is a queue. This queue largely has two features:
- Allow information to be dealt with asynchronously (aka at some arbitrary time in the future)
- Prioritize said information
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 theory, that is.
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?
To deal with foreign systems, individuals must enact systems of their own as preventive mechanisms. While there are many good systems for dealing with email inboxes, I'll only highlight one. Then I'll close out by talking about a strategy that I think makes dealing with inboxes in general more palatable.
Office Hours is a concept that prevents items from being added to your queue in the first place by setting up the following conditions:
- I am available from the window of X-Y, where you can receive an immediate reply
- Outside of office hours, you can contact me with important information through some non-trivial route (in 2024, something as simple as a phone call is often too much for people to go through with, so this is good)
The office hours method is great because it solves both problems the inbox introduces. It gives our senders a chance to ask their question and know they'll get a reply, and the sender will be able to see if you are – or aren't – bandwidth locked.
I personally take office hour calls Tuesday, and then have recently been doing a livestream office hour session on Fridays.
The office hours technique is amazing, but at the end of the day, it is merely a technique.
For the inbox in general, I think we need to do better. Strategies will only take us so far. In order to conquer our inbox, we must think bigger than workarounds.
As mentioned prior, the inbox is a system unto itself. A combination of bad actors and downward societal pressures makes each individual inbox a slightly different version of hell. To get out means we must change the rules of play.
In 1894, a report by the state legislature found that New York was the densest city in the world, surpassing Paris, London, and Bombay, with the Lower East Side being the most densely populated place on the planet. After some bombshell reporting by the muck-raking journalist Jacob Riis, in his book How the Other Half Lives, NYC became a much clearer picture of graspable problems. In 1901, Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York, signed the Tenement House Act into law preventing tenement homes from being built in NYC.
113 years later, the Lower East Side (not without its problems, mind you), maintains its history while being one of the most attractive destinations to tourist and live on Earth. Changing the rules works.
It may seem farcical, but our inboxes can change as well. Allow me to add one feature to the specification I gave for an inbox above:
"This queue largely has two three features:"
- Allow information to be dealt with asynchronously (aka at some arbitrary time in the future)
- Prioritize said information
- Every manual effort put into the inbox improves the density and utility of the overall system
The third item isn't a feature that queues provide out the box, but is now technologically feasible thanks to advents in vector embeddings and Personal Library Science.
When you take action in an inbox, the system itself should compile that knowledge. This compilation of knowledge can show the user distant relationships from seemingly disparate sources of information – and more importantly – develop a cow pathing automaticity over time. Instead of an auto responder or a binary "mark as important flag", this third rule sits at the level below, organizing information in holistically useful manner for the owner of the inbox.
The third rule happens in the during and after of inbox processing, and informs future interaction, and is not technically concerned with delivery or prioritizing/filtering.
If done correctly, the stigma of an inbox will hopefully – slowly – loosen its grip on our collective psyche.
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