Randy Pausch and The Empty Inbox

I listened to Randy Pausch's talk on time management, and he speaks about his empty inbox for a few seconds⊕I suggest listening to the entire talk, as it is an invaluable resource. However, if you just want to hear the quote, click here.:

A few years ago, when I first listened to this talk, I had cleared my inbox. Now, it was time to do it again. I checked my inbox: I had more than 1700 emails left unread. It was a lot of clutter, and the pile was growing everyday. Even if I could search and find a particular one when needed, it was a burden to deal with so much mail. It reduced effectiveness - I wasn't getting the most out of my mail program.

A lot of those emails were just receipts and advertisements, many of them atleast six months old. I would never go back and actually read them. I archived the receipts, and deleted the advertisements.

This exercise got me thinking - it could be that I wasn't using the inbox the right way. Letting it pile into a large heap of unread mail, and then bulk deleting is not good: I might end up deleting important mail. Surely, there has to be a better way to keep my inbox clean.

A Google search for how to keep inbox clean comes up with many articles on this topic. The main takeaway is to unsubscribe from all the mail you don't read, and to delete all the mail you won't need. On receiving new mail, you respond to it as soon as possible, and move it into another folder. You can also setup your mail program to automatically label certain mail using filters. You don't have to do it all at once: put aside a few minutes a day to manage your inbox, and it should be pretty clean in a week. Emptying your inbox as a routine practice has even been named Inbox-Zero by Merlin Mann.

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Why it is called an in-box and not in-list? Where is this box of which you speak?

An inbox / in-tray / in-basket was a thing back in the twentieth century. You were supposed to put the incoming office mail into the in-box (in-coming mail-box) on your desk and deal with it till you were done with all the associated requests.

You would then go on to write letters and put them in the out-box. In the process, you would make documents, receipts and other records by hand.

If you had a bunch of related papers, you would bind the sheets (with strings and glue) into a file. A file folder (commonly called a folder) holds multiple files. A shelf / cabinet holds store multiple folders.

You would archive documents by taking them off of your desk and storing them in another place, so you can search for them at a later time. And to trash is to put it aside, in this case, into a bin, where it stays till the bin is emptied.

Electronic files, however, are not bound together with strings, and might not be comprised of pages. We simply say folder to mean file folder, and we don't need shelves or cabinets in our computers: folders do the job, because they can hold other folders too.

TL;DR: An inbox in a e-mail program is a skeuomorph. ⊕ A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that were necessary in the original. Click here to read more about it.