Empty thine in-box

Let's just get this confession over with: My in box is not empty. At the moment, it contains 16,694 messages. Once, I suppose, my in box must have had a zero message count -- maybe back in 1991, when I got my first e-mail account. It has not seen zero since.

Yet I do not struggle to empty my in box. Instead, when I scan new messages, I ruthlessly trash spam or irrelevancies, auto-filter mailing-list messages, and then flag ("label" or tag) any messages that require further response or action. The rest just flow on by after I've glanced at them.

My in box is not a desk that must be cleared. It is a river from which I can always easily fish whatever needs my attention. Why try to push the river? Computer storage is cheaper than my time; archiving is easier than deleting. At the end of every year I move the oldest 20,000 or so messages into their own folder. Then I let my in box fill up again. (Admittedly, I don't use Outlook, which doesn't always handle fat mailboxes gracefully.)

Do we really want the job of in-box attendant and e-mail folder file clerk? The mess is Augean scale, the job Sisyphean futile. At least under Allen's "GTD" model, you (along with maybe some relatives or colleagues) control the flow into your own in box of "things to do." But anyone can stuff anything into your e-mail in box. If you accept Hurst's mission of "getting to zero," it will keep eating up more of your day no matter how efficient you are. And you'll be letting other people control your time.

The argument for the empty in box depends on the notion that a crowded in box is a psychic burden. But that's only true if you feel that a crowded in box represents a failure. What if you don't care -- and you still Get your Things Done? What if you believe -- as the book "A Perfect Mess" argued earlier this year -- that neatness is overrated, and moderate disorganization is a sign of creativity and productivity? Messy is exuberant, and exuberance is beauty. A clean in box might be a proud badge of productivity. But it might mean you wasted hours every day fussing over your e-mail when you could have been writing your own "War and Peace," building the next Google, or drinking a glass of wine.

The experts mostly agree that an empty in box is a must. I'm sure they would view me as a basket case. Then again, in this decade the most successful and innovative new tool for managing e-mail is Google's Gmail, which is custom-made for my approach: Instead of expecting you to be your in box's groomer and custodian, Gmail discourages the use of folders, archives old messages automatically and offers a great search tool. Rather than enslave you to your in box, it harnesses machine power to handle the machine-fueled flood.

"Bit Literacy" and "Send" both view e-mail -- and online existence in general -- as problems to be managed. There are plenty of good reasons for that defensive stance. But the Gmail example shows that other postures are possible. For instance, because Gmail pools the feedback from all its users about which incoming messages are spam, it's superbly efficient at blocking that spam from your view. As "Everything Is Miscellaneous" author David Weinberger puts it, "The solution to the information overload problem is more information."

Mark Frauenfelder's new book "Rule the Web" -- a hands-on guide to the latest generation of online tools for productivity and creativity -- is for people who look at their fat in boxes and cry, "Bring it on!" Don't over-worry about managing your information flow, "Rule the Web" implies; instead, check out these dozens of ways you can mash up your info-stream with everyone else's. In other words, if you don't like the bits you receive, go out and make some of your own.

"Rule the Web" is a miscellany of mostly free services, tools and tips for managing e-mail and blogs and feeds and photos and music and videos. (Full disclosure: I contributed a paragraph -- uncompensated -- to the book's appendix, which features suggestions from bloggers.) Keeping up with this stuff is part of my work, yet I learned at least a half-dozen useful new tricks.

This is not as targeted a tome as "Send" or "Bit Literacy," but it's considerably more fun. Frauenfelder, who founded the phenomenally popular BoingBoing blog in 2000, takes an upbeat view of the opportunities the Net affords us -- but there's nothing naive about his optimism. "Rule the Web's" canvas includes scam artists and virus writers and flamers and such; it just doesn't let the bad stuff get it down.

Some significant chunks of "Rule the Web" consist of step-by-step explanations of Web-based services that, really, ought to be self-explanatory. And the material covered is ephemeral enough that some of it will date rapidly. (There are updates and new tidbits on the book's blog.)

Mostly, however, "Rule the Web's" cornucopia of cool stuff is a treat. It's also a reminder of why we bother to spend so much time with e-mail and the Web in the first place: They're full of life. They're changing all the time. And they can still surprise us -- at least when we keep the Viagra-ad detritus from blocking the view.

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