Tony Hsieh, who runs the online shoe retailer Zappos, is worth more than half a billion pounds. He lives in a camper van with his pet alpaca, and likes to run oddball experiments at his company: last year, he essentially abolished all the managers. In short, he’s a wealthy eccentric. So when I heard he’d developed an amazing solution to email overload, I wasn’t hopeful; I assumed it involved paying someone else to answer it (maybe the alpaca?). But I was wrong. Hsieh hasn’t “solved email” – spoiler alert: nobody ever will – but after testing his system, I can report that it makes things much saner. He calls it “Yesterbox”, because the premise is that you should stop focusing on email received today, except when urgent, and instead try to deal with everything that came in yesterday. It’s an idea so simple, your first response might legitimately be, “Huh? What difference could that make?” A big one, it turns out.
Trying to stay on top of email is a losing battle partly because there’s always more coming in and partly because it’s self-defeating: sending an email usually triggers another in response, leaving you no better off. But yesterday’s email isn’t like that. Yesterday has already happened, so the number of incoming messages is fixed. Not even the meanest boss or neediest friend can make further claims on your time in the past. And so, in your Yesterbox, you’re no longer on a treadmill: one email dealt with means one fewer to deal with; the target you’re aiming for isn’t receding constantly into the distance. “There is a sense of completion when you’re done, which is amazing,” Hsieh writes. (In Gmail, using today’s date as an example, you can show yesterday’s emails by searching “before:2016/4/15 in: inbox”.) Admittedly, if you’ve thousands of emails from earlier than yesterday, you’ll need a separate plan for those. Try moving them into a folder called “backlog”, and spending half an hour a day on them until they’re gone.
The Yesterbox strategy turns your inbox into what the productivity coach Mark Forster calls a “closed list”: it can’t get any bigger. His book, Do It Tomorrow, explores ways of applying the “yesterday” focus to tasks besides email. One option is to write your to-do list for the day, rule a line underneath, and add all further incoming to-dos beneath it, except for emergencies. Aim to finish the tasks above the line. Then, next day, draw another line, so that yesterday’s incoming items become today’s closed list, and so on.
What Yesterbox won’t do, regrettably, is turn a fundamentally unmanageable workload into a manageable one – but productivity tricks can’t do that. Rather, in addition to that “sense of completion”, it’s powerfully clarifying: if your average daily output isn’t a match for your average daily input, it won’t let you trick yourself otherwise. Then you can start making tough decisions: which emails to strategically neglect; which deserve only short answers. When you focus on today, it’s easy to convince yourself that victory over email is coming, sometime in the future. Forget it. Start living in the past instead.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
