Quick Win: Why inbox zero is a myth (and what to do instead)

If your inbox is overflowing and you can’t shake the guilt of unanswered emails, you’re not alone. In this Quick Win episode, New York Times bestselling author Chris Guillebeau shares his email strategy for fighting time anxiety - including why he’s totally fine with ignoring some emails (even if it ticks people off). 

Chris also explains how email bankruptcy helped him reset his inbox every year, and why trying to be an “email ninja” can backfire when you’re focused on the wrong things. 

Chris and I talk about: 

• Why “inbox guilt” is so hard to shake—and how Chris reframed it 

• The bold email strategy Chris uses to stay sane 

• Why he’s been doing email bankruptcy for the last 5–6 years 

• The real reason he’s okay with not replying to every email 

Key Quotes: 

“If I am always responsive, that means I’m not doing other things.” 
“I just archive everything that’s in the inbox that I haven’t responded to.” 

Listen to the full interview with Chris here.  

Connect with Chris on Instagram, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn and his website, Listen to his podcast Side Hustle School, and check out his latest book Time Anxiety. 

 

My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/ 

Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber) 

Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai) 

If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha-imber.ck.page/subscribe 

Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes. 

Get in touch at [e-mail] 

  

Credits: 

Host: Amantha Imber 

Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
No matter how hard most of us try, it always
feels like there is a never ending stream of emails
to reply to and not enough time in which to
do so. If you reply too fast, you get more emails,
and if you don't reply fast enough, you forget or
run out of time to reply and then end up
feeling guilty. If you can relate, then today's guest might

(00:24):
have the answer to the email problem you've been struggling with.
Chris Gilibo is a New York Times best selling author
whose book The One Hundred Dollars Startup sold over half a
million copies and his side Hustle School podcast has surpassed
one hundred million downloads worldwide. In this quick win, we'll
be exploring what email bankruptcy is and why it could

(00:48):
be making you stressed out, and the bold email strategy
Chris uses to fight time anxiety even if it ticks
people off, and also why he's completely fine with that.
Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals,

(01:08):
and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, Doctor
Amantha Imba. Email is such a time waster for so
many people, and I feel like there are quite a
few interesting ways and innovative ways that you've thought about

(01:29):
just how people can contact you and spending less futile
hours in the inbox. Tell me what's been most impactful
for you in terms of reducing the time anxiety with email.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
I feel like I should first say that, you know,
we talked about like what was my greatest problem or
what was I experiencing. You know, as I came to
the research project behind this book, guilt about my email
and my inbox was just so powerful and so overwhelming.
It was probably the thing I felt the most guilty
about for years, because I would begin almost every sentence

(02:05):
of every email with like it's like, I'm so sorry
for the delay in reply, you know, it's like that's
just like my introduction, that's just could be just templated.
And then I noticed I was either very fast or
very very slow and getting back to people like I
would try to be fast, but if I didn't respond
the same day, it was going to be days or weeks,
and I would just keep thinking about it. It's not

(02:27):
like I had forgotten, you know, it wasn't out of sight,
out of mind, but I would feel this great resistance,
you know, to going back to it. So I feel
like what a lot of systems and productivity methods do
is they're providing like some tools and things, but they're
not really addressing the psychological problems behind why we have
resistance towards email, for example, or why it's hard for

(02:50):
people to be on time, or many other examples that
we could talk about. And so for me, some of
it is just kind of grace and understanding, like I'm
not going to be like a great email ninja. There's
a lot of people that I'm probably not going to
be able to get back to. Like I used to
really prize responsiveness and equate responsiveness with excellence, and maybe

(03:12):
I've just kind of shifted in that because if I
am always responsive, that means I'm not doing other things,
and I want to be writing books and you know,
creating projects and doing other work.

Speaker 3 (03:24):
So maybe that's the first thing.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
It's just understanding like I can't do it all, creating
little buckets of time where I'm like, Okay, I'm just
going to go in and spend twenty minutes and try
to respond to as much as possible, but I don't
have like like have you seen these like well, of
course you have like the auto responders people always have
like I only check email between you know, four fifteen and.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
Four twenty five pm or whatever, but I'll get back
to you. Then people that use those I feel like they.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
Never actually get back to you during that time. They've
set this up for themselves and some like they think
this is going to be, you know, a great things true, right,
but that doesn't actually work for them. And they're also
the people that tend to intrusive.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
You know.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
What's funny is like they need something from you and
they're reaching out to you, and then you actually respond,
but then you get kind of told off. They're like, oh,
I shouldn't emailed you right now because this is not
your email hours. So that's another observation. But I guess
I've just tried to kind of get away from being
a perfectionist about it.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
You wrote about in time anxiety. I think, did you
call it email bankruptcy? And I want to know if
you still do this, if you did this in January,
tell me what is email bankruptcy?

Speaker 3 (04:29):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (04:29):
So I've got all of these messages, you know, in
my in box. It's not like a huge number. I
mean to some people that have thousands, but when they
get to those large numbers. It's not that they have
thousands of individual messages written to them, Like they're just
copied on a bunch of stuff, you know, so that
you can kind of go through and clean out. But
so it's not a huge number, but there's there's often
like I don't know, between fifty and one hundred messages

(04:50):
that I just don't respond to and they actually need
something from me, and those are the ones that I
feel really bad about. And so weeks go by and
months go by, and just you know, think about what
do I do about this? And so sometimes I have
like a to dread list where I'm like, what are
all the things that I dread that I'm dreading right now?
I'm going to write that down and try to spend
some time about that. But with emails specifically, like sometimes

(05:14):
things just get too far behind and it's not really
going to be that helpful, you know, for me to
like if somebody wrote three months ago needing something urgently,
I mean I could write and apologize, but just dealing
with whatever they were asking about, they don't clearly don't
need it now They've solved their problems some other way,
so I just like every January, it's like I just
archive everything that's in the inbox that I haven't responded to,

(05:36):
and I start over, and then I tend to do
a much better job at least for a while, because
things are all like fresh and clean. And so I
think I used to like actually like send out a
note to people like, hey, so sorry, I might have
missed your message, send it again. But now I just
don't do that because people don't need another message on
their end, and if I do that, that's just going
to have more things coming back to me.

Speaker 3 (05:56):
So I just tried to like, let's just try to
move on.

Speaker 1 (06:00):
So how many years have you done the January email bankruptcy.

Speaker 3 (06:03):
For probably like five or six years now.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
And has there ever been a negative consequence?

Speaker 2 (06:11):
Probably there's probably some negative consequences that I don't know about.

Speaker 3 (06:14):
That's the other thing, right, Yeah, I was going to
ask you, actually, what do you think about this? Does
this stress you out? You know?

Speaker 2 (06:20):
Do you seem like a person who is like super
responsive and always on the ball and I respect that
so much? Are you like I would never do something
like that.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
I hope you enjoyed this little quick win with Chris.
I highly recommend checking out his book Time Anxiety, and
a link to the full interview with Chris is in
the show notes.

Speaker 3 (06:39):
If you like.

Speaker 1 (06:39):
Today's show, make sure you get follow on your podcast
app to be alerted when new episodes drop. How I
Work was recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery people,
part of the cool And Nation.