Until very recently, my email strategy has been very simple. When I receive an email, I read it. I usually respond very quickly, especially since I use the Gmail feature that shows the number of unread emails in the tab icon. After I deal with it, I leave it in the inbox, so I have an almost complete record of all my emails (I did try deleting unimportant emails a few years ago). As you might imagine, with all my email lists and password reset notices and actual important email, I’ve accumulated, over the course of twelve years, fifteen thousand and six emails (I’d like to reach 20,000, so if you email me with your email thoughts, you’re a drop in the bucket). That sounds like a lot, but it’s not, when a good chunk of it is email lists, or emails from years prior that are no longer relevant to me.

In the past week, as I’ve been emailing a bunch of type designers to be interviewed for my type design zine, and there are some emails that are going to take a bit longer to respond to, I’ve been marking them as unread. It’s certainly not the most efficient way (I really like what Talanoa is doing with kanban to-do lists in email, but I’m so used to Gmail it’s hard to fully switch). Combined with the notice in the tab icon, and my glancing every five seconds at my email (did it again!), I’m reminded of the email that I have to deal with, and it makes me feel like there is one small thing hanging over my head. Not enough to stress me out, but enough to give me a quick nudge to stop perfecting my over-the-top spreadsheets and do something more productive. That one lingering email is actually a motivator.

As I thought about it, I realized that Inbox Zero is not the right strategy. While I like that, in what I do, all of my emails are neatly in a list, striving to have zero unread emails is not actually a useful productivity strategy. I don’t want to have thousands of unread emails, like my teachers (the most I’ve ever seen in unread emails by one of my teachers is somewhere around 157,000, which is crazy), but keeping an email or two open actually helps. It doesn’t feel so far off from Inbox Zero, which is part of why it’s so useful. It’s only one or two tasks that you need to attend to, yet it pushes you to knock the rest of the items off your to-do list. And if you’ve done everything you need to do, just mark any random email as unread. Just seeing that you have an unread email will push you to achieve more.

You probably don’t believe me, especially since you’ve most likely been using the same email strategy for decades, and I’m only 12. But if you have thousands of unread emails, just mark them all as read and start from a clean slate—if you have that many, it can’t possibly mean that you have to deal with that many tasks. And if you’re like me, an Inbox Zeroer, just mark one email as unread and continue on whatever task you were working on.

I encourage you to try it for a day: if you receive this in your inbox, mark it as unread after you finish reading it. And if you’re reading this on the web, you’ll need to subscribe! 😀

Let me know how it goes, and let’s see how long it takes for me to reach 20,000 emails (19,999 if you don’t count the unread email).