Confessions of a 100k Inboxer
"Whadda ya gonna do, huh?", he shrugs (as if he is Tony Soprano)
A big sign of the malaise of our times is that there’s no term to describe the opposite of a zero-inbox person. I don’t refer to no average slob who lets emails pile up for a bit here, either. I am talking about a term describing a human at the farthest opposite end of the zero-inbox spectrum, a human soaking in the near-catastrophic anarchy of existence like it’s a warm shower.
What do we call such a man? 100K-Inboxer? Emperor of entropy? Master of mess?
Me.
Inbox of big numbers
Did you spot that 6-digit signboard displaying my indifference up there?
My inbox is a haven for unread emails. I’m convinced some of them arrived from before Gmail was even born—rebels breaking the time-space continuum to seek refuge in one place where they know they’d never be disturbed.
Inside this digital trash can, you’ll find:
Newsletters from long-deceased airlines (Jet Airways, anyone?) exhorting me to book for an extra 10% off.
Google Talk chat threads from friends with whom I’ve long lost touch.
A few dozen onboarding emails from that random app I signed up for one evening in 2017 and forgot immediately.
Old itineraries of trips, memorable and mundane.
Email threads from days of pre-social media when I apparently couldn’t bother starting sentences with capital letters.
Bodyless ghost emails with PDF attachments I am scared to open now.
I open my Gmail inbox the same way I open the trash, head arched back, nose closed, and hoping to transact quickly and be done with it. And yet, occasionally when I am forced (by Gmail’s surprisingly shitty search) to root through it like an information rodent, I am shocked by just how trashy my trash box is.
Outlook: Murky
My work inboxes were similar piles of trash just held in a different can—one painted the eternally dull blue of Microsoft Outlook.
My first five years of corporate life involved spending at least an hour every two weeks desperately cleaning out emails from my inbox after flooding out the server capacity allotted to me. This, after ignoring multiple emails for several days before warning me that my inbox was “80% full,” “Almost full,” “Soon, you’ll stop receiving emails,” to “Inbox is full Moron! Make space or prepare to die!” emails exhorting me.
My archival mechanisms then evolved to be slightly better, which was to create a single folder called archive and dump everything there so I could just delete live emails.
One really cringy moment in my career was when a manager once stood behind me to talk over an old email he’d sent, looking at my inbox as I searched for it. I could feel his growing horror as he realized that his team's ‘valued member’ was a sociopath in the email department. I felt violated, as if I’d shown my deepest existential mess to a man I barely trusted. It’s the day I vowed never to open my inbox to another human again.
If you think my inbox is the trailer for the near-derailment movie that is my life, you are right. The main plot point is actually the to-do lists.
The unbearable heaviness of checking things off
Someone who hated making lists once said,
"Life cannot be reduced to a to-do list."
But have they ever considered that life can be expanded to infinite to-do lists?
I’ve procreated more to-do lists than Elon Musk has children. The virile concoction of anxiety, love for dreaming big, and breaking down ideas has led me to the comforting arms of various to-do apps, notepads, calendar apps, and even physical notebooks to create to-do listlets. They are treated with the same level of indifference and abandonment as Elon does with his children.
It’s not that I don’t intend to do the things on my to-do list (which, let me remind you, I CREATED MYSELF), but somewhere between making the list and the passage of time, things unravel in predictable ways:
The Rise: Life as an unmoored vagabond quickly gets to me, and a manic need to organize things takes over. I might clean up my desk, move files around, and then create a new to-do list (cue the HBO intro music). I might even install a whole new app (because clearly, the app was the problem). Clean slate.
The Hope: The list thrives for some time. It feeds on my aspirational industriousness and spits validation as things are crossed off. Power surges through me. Is sticking to your checklists the real Limitless drug?
The Flood: Then come the days when the list doesn’t feel as crisp, its material UX feels less material, and every item feels like an obligation. Things don’t get checked. Overdue items pile up. And soon there's just too much being added, and it’s all a big mess.
The Abandonment: The list stares at me, a growing garbage mound of my failure. Then, one day, the entire lot is abandoned, leaving the list to rot and desultory crows of ennui to circle.
The Unmooring: I live life as a hunter-gatherer; plans are reduced to living a day at a time; my anxiety a compass for what tasks to do every day. “The joy of scribbling on a piece of paper with a pen,” I say as I hastily write down the three things to do on a given day.
The life as an unmoored vagabond gets old fast. Back to step 1.
I’ve tried them all: fancy to-do apps, frameworks from productivity preachers, calendar blocking, the matrix named after the ex-president, yellow sticky pads, task reminders that call your mother, etc. They are all my favorite ways of not doing the things I plan on doing.
It isn’t just the email and to-do lists either.
Everything, everywhere, all at once (and then never)
In an attempt to look for some boring document, I connected one of the five old hard disks where I hold assorted digital mess. I seemed to have gotten distracted (evidently) because forty-five minutes later, I was clicking through and reading a folder of text files of stories I had written fifteen years back. A dozen files with just a title and many stories written anywhere from 2K to 4K words, most lying abandoned1.
In my Could Be Worse dashboard sit 40 drafts —half-written essays, a few dozen words, or sometimes just titles- floating away into nothingness as I abandon them for the sake of vibes.
I’m a defiler of new snack packets. If you present me with two snacks - one opened and another completely new—I’d pick the new one.
I am a tardigrade programmed to seek the shiny synchronicity of the new; a hound for low-entropy coziness, where the air is filled with the promise of the fresh, the crisp, the clean, and the organized. I am all too ready to lose interest the moment something frays, bloats, or repeats.
Making sense of it
Don’t get me wrong. I admire the organized. I eternally seek it. I’ve talked to bosses and colleagues who just seem to have that secret sauce to a life lived within the sharp structure. I’ve seen folder structures and file organization that you wouldn’t believe. I’ve gushed, applauded, and asked, “Help me, sensei!”
Ironically (or not surprisingly), N is one of those. N is a zero-inboxer. No platform has vague, unread messages sticking around like a bad cousin. She’s been on one list-making app where she maintains her list actively. Her primary goal in life passion in life is finishing things — those final scoops, the last biscuits, the last spoon of opened jam bottles. She wouldn’t even consider something new if an n=1 of that item exists and is being used (not even two flavors of chips).
How I live often terrifies, sometimes inconveniences, and occasionally angers her.
"Why did you open a new box of ice cream when the previous one is open already?”
Such questions fail to make sense to me.
“Because…it’s that new flavor I wanted then?”
Maybe I am fine
We are all constantly running towards something. For me, it's seeking an idealized order, which has always been an elusive step away.
It turns out that in the process of constantly stumbling to establish order (and failing), life’s been lived. Milestones have been hit. Resources have been accrued. Joy has been had.
It dawned on me that if I kept pretending to figure this out some more, soon enough, there wouldn’t be a need at all. The life would have been lived.
To my fellow 100K inboxers, don’t despair. I know that you shiver in the icy grip of chaos as you try to get a semblance of order in your life. Perhaps some of you are content falling into the lap of life’s relentless unpredictability with wild abandon. Either way, know that this is the order of the universe.
The Earth is in a constant freefall, its decaying orbit taking it ever closer into the Sun, which is in a freefall itself. Countless star systems of our galaxy are in a doom-spiral around a supermassive black hole. Order is an illusion.
We are the natural order. Zero inboxers are the aberration.
Maybe we aren’t meant to subdue every little quirk of disorganization. Maybe I am fine?
… unless there’s an email congratulating me on a million-dollar lottery win that I haven't opened yet for more than a decade.
Could be Worse,
Tyag
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Incidentally, there was one darkly humorous story there of a man who is a regular corporate employee but loses his shit one day and holds the entire company hostage with a gun. Incomplete, of course, but it also made me reflect that my views on corporate life hadn’t changed a bit in a decade or more.
Zero inboxer here but lot of todos, haha. Great read.
Hilarious!
I try to be a zero inboxer. But we have a shared affinity for to-do lists. The more harried I am, the more items I add to my lists. (You feature in them now, in fact. I promise I'll get back soon!) Sometimes, when daily to-do lists don't cut it out, because there's just too much to do, I make hourly ones and then predictably fail to finish any of the tasks. It's horrible.