I used to think Inbox Zero was the mark of a disciplined mind.

For a brief stretch in the late 2000s, the practice (ideology?) promised a life under control and a mind unburdened. But somewhere along the way, it became a treadmill.

Inbox Zero is not an end state at all - it’s a Sisyphean ritual.

Every cleared inbox is a boulder rolled uphill, only to tumble down again the next morning.

Eventually I stopped.

More accurately, I declared bankruptcy.

As of September 2025, my system is simple:

Every day, I do my best to reply to the emails I can.

When the last day of the month arrives, I delete everything still sitting in my inbox. If a message matters, it’ll find its way back. If it vanishes, that’s often the truer measure of its value.

It’s inbox zero, but not as the founding fathers intended.

Inbox Zero rests on the idea that being maximally responsive to communication channels is equivalent to being maximally effective.

But I can think of countless examples of leaders, thinkers, and creators who thrived despite (or perhaps because of) their selective indifference to correspondence. Charles Darwin frequently allowed letters to pile up unanswered, devoting his attention to projects that demanded solitude and long stretches of uninterrupted thought. Virginia Woolf, in her diaries, railed against the interruptions of letters and visits, understanding (and resenting) that the endless duty of reply could erode her creative momentum.

What Inbox Zero demands is not unlike what Franz Kafka described in his office work at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute: a ceaseless stream of claims and counterclaims, most of which carried little weight compared to the work he considered truly vital.

He knew the bureaucratic machinery would never stop generating new files.

Our inboxes generate their own paperless equivalents, multiplying in volume without end.

It’s exhausting.

Email pretends to be a neutral medium of communication, but it’s the architecture of far too much anxiety.

Every unopened message hints that something is waiting, something might be wrong, something might demand your attention. Inbox Zero functions less as a productivity technique than as a way to quiet that anxious whisper, at least temporarily. But the relief is fragile. The emails return tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Macbeth would feel vindicated.

The inbox fills, we clear it, the inbox fills again. To embrace Inbox Zero as a permanent goal is to embrace a kind of absurdity. Camus counseled us to imagine Sisyphus happy, but perhaps we should imagine him closing his inbox, shutting down the laptop, and walking outside // touching grass.

Most crises, in retrospect, are indifferent to the speed of our replies.

Did the urgent client message from two weeks ago turn out to be urgent after all? How often does the situation resolve itself, either because someone else addressed it or because it simply decayed into irrelevance?

When I delete my backlog at the end of each month, what I’m really doing is acknowledging that urgency is fleeting. What remains is rarely consequential.

In the 19th century, clerks in London financial firms often delayed responding to letters, fully aware that many issues resolved themselves if left alone. As Walter Bagehot observed in Lombard Street, the British financial system depended not on constant action but on the discipline to avoid acting too quickly. The same principle applies to modern correspondence. The real cost of the constant reply is not measured in minutes spent - it’s in attention lost.

An inbox is, famously, a to-do list written by other people. Every email represents someone else’s priorities projected into your day. Inbox Zero is really less about managing your own life than about submitting to the tasks others set for you.

Hannah Arendt warned about the danger of becoming absorbed into "the social," the endless web of minor obligations that slowly consume the capacity for real political and creative action. Email, with its daily accretion of trivial demands, is this danger personified.

To obsess over Inbox Zero is to surrender to the idea that every demand must be met, every query answered, every thread completed. But the measure of a meaningful life has rarely (read: never) been the speed of reply.

Time and attention are finite.

I can’t process the entire flood of inputs that fight for my extremely limited time on this (increasingly God-forsaken) rock, and pretending otherwise is pure self-deception.

There's a Stoic practice here, of negative visualization: by imagining loss in advance, you loosen its grip. By deleting an inbox full of unresolved requests, you are staging that loss and moving on.

Productivity culture revolves around optimization. But in a culture where inputs multiply like so many rabbits, optimization is damn-near impossible. Bankruptcy, paradoxically, is the more honest system. The premise: that most things will go unanswered and that this is acceptable.

Socrates famously ignored most civic obligations, wandering the agora in conversation rather than attending to letters or official business. Michel de Montaigne retreated to his tower, leaving political responsibilities aside, to cultivate his essays. The novelist Neal Stephenson has written at length about his refusal to answer emails, explaining that any hour spent responding to messages is an hour not spent writing novels. His output speaks for itself.

These examples suggest a deliberate hierarchy of values, a willingness to let the inbox burn so that something else might finally become visible: philosophy, literature, art, invention.

Email bankruptcy is not so much abdication as prioritization.

Inbox Zero is the illusion of mastery.

To conquer the inbox feels like conquering the day, like pushing back entropy.

But entropy always wins. The inbox is a microcosm of the world’s infinite demands. No one ever truly gets to zero for long. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has described modern life as one of "achievement-subjects" constantly exhausting themselves through self-imposed productivity rituals. Inbox Zero is a small but telling example: a voluntary submission to endless labor, disguised as freedom.

When I wipe the inbox at the end of the month, I reject that illusion. I choose to live with imperfection, with loose ends, with the possibility that I missed something. The time saved is not the primary gain; I'm far more interested in the absence of constant background pressure - in the ability to attend, at least for a few precious moments, to something larger.

The economist Herbert Simon wrote that "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Our inboxes are the practical manifestation of that principle. The solution can’t just be to optimize endlessly within the system; we have to reduce the claim that the system has on us, once and for all.

In practical terms, this might mean forgiving the email bankruptcy of our network, or at least accepting that the world doesn't revolve around our own correspondence. It might mean radical filtering, answering only a handful of correspondents and letting the rest fall away. Inbox infinity is an option, too. The precise form matters less than the stance: refusing to treat every incoming demand as a mandate.

Inbox Zero promises peace but the peace doesn't last.

I've found it's far more productive to accept a degree of failure in order to clear space for something else. It's an experiment in trusting that the world can go on without my constant attendance, and it's a bet that what truly matters will find its way home.

So when the end of the month comes, I hit delete.

I don't imagine myself to be efficient.

But I do feel free.

And then I wait to see what comes back.

I appreciate the irony of saying all of this in an email newsletter.

But I don't write Westenberg (or anything else) with the belief that my work has the weight of a mandate. Whether you choose to unsubscribe or delete it without reading is entirely your choice, and I hope you make it with your sanity in mind, over any feelings of mine.

You are the reader.

It's your inbox.

Don't let anyone convince you they have a right to it - myself included.