86. Why we fill our inbox with so much junk

I used to have many emails that are just sitting in my inbox for days, weeks or even months. I tried purging my inbox, again and again, only to end up getting flooded with clutter again.

Apart from the discipline issue, I realized the main reason I kept so many junk emails was my fear of missing out. There’s a lot of emails that I feel that I need to check or else I will miss out on something valuable. But I just didn’t have the time or the motivation to do it at the moment. So I left them there, hoping that the future wiser me would have that imaginary time and interests to actually get to them one day.

Of course that day never actually came. The vicious FOMO cycle continues and those emails end up stuck on the same spot for eternity.

I’ve come to accept that when I think of doing anything ‘later’ with an email, that means it will never happen at all. So I should either reply immediately if it takes less than 3 minutes or schedule a time on my calendar to process all the heavy emails in one batch. If I still didn’t review the emails at the scheduled time, then it just means that I have to immediately archive them. Time to bid farewell, E-FOMO.

P.S. I use Inbox by Gmail — does wonders in getting me to inbox zero almost every day!