The Holy Grail: an empty inbox

My e-mail inbox drives me crazy.  I hate it.  The number of e-mails in my In-Box makes a huge difference in how overwhelmed I feel.  If I have over 400 e-mails, I feel that my work life is out of control.  I feel hopelessly behind.  At these times, I just know that I must be missing commitments right and left, that there are lots of people who feel I've let them down, who are wondering why I won't answer their urgent requests, who think that I don't care much about their needs.

At 300 e-mails, I feel I'm still behind but I'm catching up.  At 200, I feel I'm contributing at a high level.  At 100 or less, I feel like they are DARN lucky to have me working for them.

I do a lot more in my job than react to e-mails.  But the size of my inbox is still the best indicator of the degree of control I feel over my workload.

In his book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, David Allen says many people refer to an empty inbox as the "Holy Grail" of his "Getting Things Done" (GTD) system.  GTD is much, much more than an empty inbox, but this is one of the ultimate, visible rewards of using the system.

A cluttered e-mail inbox or a full paper/mail inbox distracts me from whatever else I'm trying to do on that computer or in the room with the paper inbox.  It grabs my attention because I'm concerned that there is stuff in there that I ought to be doing, but I'm not sure what it is.  Always calls a bunch of e-mails "stuff" because it is no clearer, no more distinct than the word "stuff".  I haven't decided yet what I'm going to do with this "stuff".  Do I trash it?  File it for future reference?  Is there an action I should take?  Should I take it now, or save it in a list of ideas for future actions?  Until I've made AND documented these decisions and any resulting action that I need to do, it's all just "stuff" that I might need to do something about and it might be very important.  I can't concentrate on other things very well when there are 400 items that might need me to act.

Allen's GTD system is unique among time management systems in its insistence on getting the inbox to zero every day or two, and unique in the process it teaches you to get there.  I've never made it.  I get at least 50 e-mails a day, and it feels as I have to pick between processing these e-mails and doing my main job.  But I think I'm wrong about that.  I haven't followed rigorously enough the GTD flow-chart for getting through e-mails quickly.  I can't describe the whole process here, but it involves first making decisions about each e-mail at lightning speed (trash it?  file it? act on it?), then--if there is action required--either doing it right away or adding the action to the appropriate list.

In the last couple of weeks, I've gone from over 300 e-mails to just under 90 while being buried with deadlines, developing and delivering training programs, and creating the most complex computer programs I've ever developed.  As always, every time I break another 100 e-mail milestone, there is a huge psychological effect for me, the way stockbrokers get giddy every time the Dow reaches another 1000 point milestone.  I've GOT to make it to zero soon, and it should be no harder to maintain a level near zero than it has been to maintain 300 or 400.