No Email Day
Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:03AM Paul Lancaster is advocating that we all give up email for 24-hours on November 11.
NO EMAIL DAY is a campaign encouraging people to stop using email completely for 24hrs on 11th November 2011 and do something more productive with the time saved instead.
I’m all for doing something more productive than answering email, but what’s the reasoning behind this?
I managed to get my emails back down to zero for the second time on Wednesday 13th April 2011 (almost 4 months later)! This lasted for approximately 45mins from 3.30pm-4.15pm after which 10 new emails came through in quick succession.
It’s admirable to try to organize people all over the world to give up a huge time suck like email for one day, but what will that solve? Will everyone realize that they’ve been wasting their time for all these years and revert back to calling people on the phone and hand-writing letters to their friends and families? I doubt it.
The problem with Lancaster’s premise is that Inbox Zero isn’t about maintaining a zero balance on your inbox - it’s about learning to process the messages that come in. Call my a cynic, but the only thing I see coming out of “NO EMAIL DAY” is 24-hours-worth of email to sift through on November 12th.
Merlin Mann, the guy behind Inbox Zero puts it best (obviously):
That “zero?” It’s not how many messages are in your inbox - it’s how much of your own brain is in that inbox. Especially when you don’t want it to be. That’s it.
Don’t worry about the number of messages, just make sure you’re getting all you can out of the ones taking up space - then delete them.