The virtues of indolence.

I have a secret. A dark, squishy, embarrassing secret. I have never reached inbox zero. In fact, I have several hundred unread emails in my inbox that will probably never be opened. It’s not that I don’t have a system for emails - I do! I check them twice a day, at lunchtime and before I finish for the day, and answer the new ones that need answering immediately (especially if they’re from my boss). The rest, the newsletters, and shoutouts, and automated responses, I just leave as they are. I do feel guilty about this, but mostly in the way I feel guilty about things I feel I should do but don’t want to: like dieting, or going for a jog.

My email strategy has a downside: sometimes the sheer amount of unread email gets to me. Especially once the number of unread emails reaches two thousand, I feel a tang of guilt and anxiety when I log into the client. So I do what I always do when it all becomes too much: I archive all the emails and forget about them. You might argue that this isn’t a good strategy, but I’ll just answer that it works for me.

The fact is: indolence feels good. Really good. Who /doesn’t/ want to sit on the sofa, play computer games, and read your favourite books? If I could simply become a billionaire and do nothing else but read and think about them for the rest of my life, I think that’s what I’d do. Unfortunately I live in the real world and have to do things like pay rent and eat - things which are increasingly expensive and anxiety inducing. And as a byproduct of that I feel guilty about the unread emails in my inbox. I’m not sure the guilt and anxiety over these small things is so useful, and I’m not sure it’s that this feeling is all that bad.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that my favourite category of book, article, video, tweet, is productivity. It is a guilty pleasure, as after hundreds, if not thousands, of hours spent reading, listening, and watching ways to be more productive, the only way I’ve figured out how to do stuff is to do them.

One thing I’ve noticed is that there is a whole industry of people who mostly spend their time telling people how to be more productive, but that seems to be the entirety of their output: tips on how to take more effective notes, or how to manage your time. They never seem to actually produce anything else; no art, no stories, no music. The people who get things done don’t seem to talk much about how they do it, they just get on with doing it . Phillip Roth said he wrote a page and day, and ended up writing a book a year.