Why You Should Be At Inbox Zero
“Fortune favors the prepared mind.”
— Louis Pasteur
To people who are not productivity nerds, striving for inbox zero can seem needlessly picky. There are tons of people getting by in their life with hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of emails in their email inboxes. People can live an entire life with an out of control email inbox. It’s not as if it’s that big a deal. You’ve made it this far, haven’t you?
Except… it really is a big deal. You just don’t realize it because you have too many emails. It’s like losing weight, or tidying your house, or any of those other self-improvement shticks — you don’t know what you’re missing out on. Buried in all those newsletters you don’t read are introductions for job opportunities you missed, invitations to events you never saw, and times people reached out and never heard back. Countless opportunities lost because you didn’t see an email.
Even if you do see all your emails (unlikely), that clutter is making your life much harder than it has to be. Every time you access your email, you have to sift through it the way gold miners sift through riverbeds. Meanwhile, people with clean email accounts have everything they need on hand, whenever they need it.
What separates the successful — people with their dream jobs, dream families, and more money than they know what to do with — is not the big things. It’s not the awards or the income or the resumé. It’s the little things. It’s the fact that their desks are clear, their phones have no notifications, and their inboxes are at Inbox Zero. In other words, it’s the fact that whenever opportunity strikes, they are prepared for it.
Inbox Zero doesn’t matter because it’s satisfying to look at an empty email inbox (although it totally is). Inbox Zero matters because it is tangible proof that someone is ready for what the world has to offer. After all, fortune favors the prepared mind.
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