The Inbox Day

What the day is

The Inbox Day is observed on February 8, and is usually run as a challenge to spend an hour clearing accumulated email, sometimes competitively within a workplace.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. The behavior it targets is among the better-studied habits of office life.

The finding that matters concerns frequency rather than quantity. Experiments restricting people to checking email a few times a day, against checking freely, found reduced stress in the restricted condition, and the effect was substantial. Interruption studies point the same way: recovering focus after a switch takes far longer than the interruption itself, so a message glanced at for five seconds costs minutes. The inbox does its damage through the checking, not through the reading.

Notifications are the mechanism, since an alert converts every incoming message into an interruption whether or not it deserves one. Turning them off and checking deliberately at intervals is the single change with the most evidence behind it.

The clearing itself is less important than the ritual suggests. Inbox zero as originally proposed was not about an empty screen but about processing: deciding what each message requires and putting it somewhere that decision is recorded. An empty inbox achieved by filing everything unread is theater, and the version that helps is closer to the desk-clearing principle, which is that clutter is mostly deferred decisions.

There is an obligation worth noticing too. Every message sent creates work for someone else, and a large share of internal email is copies to people who did not need them.

How to take part

• Turn off email notifications and check at set times instead. This is the high-value change.
• Process rather than tidy: act, delegate, defer with a date, or delete.
• Unsubscribe properly rather than deleting the same newsletter weekly.
• Cut the copy list on anything you send today.
• Answer the short ones immediately. They are what accumulates.