For years I’ve tried to keep my inbox at zero. I find it genuinely helps with peace of mind, and it means less procrastinating on things I’d otherwise let pile up. Over the last couple of months though, between travel and various other commitments, I let it slip, and ended up with a backlog of more than 50 emails.
How a backlog grows
Most of it was newsletters and mailing lists, plus the usual work emails and random ones I told myself I’d read “later”. That’s how it starts. Once you have ten emails sitting there, one more doesn’t feel like a big deal, so you tell yourself you’ll deal with it later and move on. The more it grows, the harder it feels to sit down and go through all of it. It becomes a loop: the pile keeps growing, and you never find the time to fix it.
A second problem: read it later
At the same time, I was looking for a new read-it-later app, ideally one I could self-host. I started with Pocket years ago, moved to Omnivore for a while, then went back to Pocket after Omnivore was bought and shut down. I hoped Pocket being owned by Mozilla would mean some stability, but Mozilla shut it down too. I won’t forgive them for that.
For a short time I tried using Raindrop.io for these longer reads too, but it felt wrong, since I already use it mainly for bookmarks. Raindrop is a really good app, but it doesn’t support self-hosting, and that goes against one of my principles: I want to own my data when I can. The problem was I hadn’t found anything self-hosted that was just as good.
In the end, almost by chance, I found Readeck. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now and I’m very happy with it. Moving from Pocket, I lost a few links, luckily none of the important ones, but it was still an annoying process.
Getting back to zero
With more than 50 emails to go through, this was my process:
- First, anything that needed my input. I replied to all the work emails and anything that needed an action from me, like filling in forms.
- Then the newsletters and mailing lists. For each one, I did a quick read of the topics. If something long and interesting caught my eye, I saved it to Readeck. If it was just a link that seemed useful for later, I put it in a triage folder in Raindrop.io instead.
That last part does shift the problem a bit further upstream, but having a handful of links to triage in Raindrop is a very different experience from having five emails each containing thirty links, most of which, honestly, I don’t care about. The former is manageable. The second is just a mess.
My plan was to clear five emails a day for two weeks. But once I got started, I found the motivation to get through the whole backlog in a couple of days. Out of the 50-plus emails, I ended up with about 40 new items in Readeck and fewer than 10 links to sort in Raindrop. I’m happy with that, because one of my goals was to save up more long reads for my free time, instead of wasting time on Reddit or news sites. Now I can read something longer in the morning before my routine starts, or in the evening while winding down.
Why this matters to me
Reading longer, more demanding articles is something I want to do more of. News today comes in small, quick pieces, and social media rewards short posts, even though I don’t use much of it myself, apart from a few communities I like on Reddit. All of that pushes you to skim instead of really focusing on what you read. I’m glad to have inbox zero back, and I hope this new process, together with Readeck, will help me keep it that way.