Reply, delete, or download it for backup safekeeping; anything other than ignoring it will do.
No matter what you choose, you must do something about the e-mail at the top of your inbox before you can proceed with the rest. And if a new one arrives in the meantime, you now have to deal with the new one first.
Deal with what you are faced with! Do not hoard information but do something about it!
Do your best work by giving yourself the time and space to zoom in on one thing at a time.
This is fundamentally the "scoped" vision of how a user could interface with software, and it all starts with a forever free e-mail service.
Want to communicate with others through a resilient (decentralized) and ubiquitous medium whilst maintaining a productive momentum and excel at whatever it is that you do?
Well too bad, the meatspace systems clashing with your tooling come with their own baggage, namely the communication styles and existing power dynamics. You don't get to excel and you don't get to be productive as long as what you do depends on something made of bones and flesh.
Inbox zero means getting to 0 e-mails in your inbox, consistently clearing up your inbox in order to clear up your mind. You
and by doing this as consistently as you can you sort of brute force your way to the state of enlightenment and nirvana.
There's now tools to help you automate this process, a lot of electricity went into training ML models that act as digital assistants or mimick an e-mail service provider altogether in order to "help you get focused".
Not everyone agrees, though:
https://chrisbailey.com/inbox-zero-is-dumb/
https://www.steverrobbins.com/articles/inboxzero/
https://loopup.com/us/resource-center/blog/inbox-zero-overrated-3-reasons-why/
https://tech.yahoo.com/apps/articles/inbox-zero-lie-gmail-strategy-173210573.html
https://www.calendar.com/blog/inbox-zero-is-dead-how-to-master-email-without-the-stress/
and many many many many many more.
So inbox zero is controversial. All of the criticism, however, revolves around the fact that there's just too many e-mails for someone to go over and by focusing too much on routing it all, all the effort needed to deal with a messy inbox is front-loaded into maintaining the inbox consistently - in real time.
So both proponents and opponents will agree that either aproach means a lot of effort which they'd all like to avoid.
But if you avoid the effort of dealing with a messy inbox by consistently cleaning it up, or - in reverse - avoid the effort of consistently cleaning up your inbox by dealing with the consequences... how does anyone really benefit from either approach?
Perhaps the problem isn't how you manage the deluge of incoherent information, some of which is beneficial to you, some of which is detrimental, some of which you need others to act on, and some of which others need you to act on? What if the fact that there is a deluge of e-mail is itself the problem?
Why don't you only get e-mail about things that actually matter, that actually benefit you? Or benefit whatever you're working on?
No, really.
Why isn't someone else e-mailed about stuff that you end up deleting or delegating? Why are you e-mailed about things that aren't relevant to you at the moment?
You are aware of course that before mail became electronic it used to get delivered by hand, by a real person, oftentimes an assistant or a secretary of some kind?
Because if there's a significant amount of mail it would mean that if it is a part of your job to communicate with that many correspondents you've probably got an employee doing a large part of that correspondence for you.
What, have we all become so important that we have to decide on and discuss as large a volume of information as an industry titan from the 20th century would ... but on a lemonade stand budget?
Everyone thinks their inbox is the problem, the point of this post is - if your inbox is so cluttered you're even interested in this topic you've got much, much bigger problems. And scoped-tech is all about implementing software solutions to not only make you excel at what you do but also make those bigger problems painfully obvious to the point something is done about them.
Stay tuned, or subscribe to the newsletter here: https://forms.gle/BbQvMeiP3M89GSNL9