I think the spirit behind inbox zero is good, and it's good to push yourself to get rid of e-mails once they hold no value to you. However, I'm not quite disciplined enough to make it happen, especially where I have a large existing backlog, and I don't like "artificially" creating an inbox zero situation by e.g. marking things as read that I haven't read, or archiving things that I haven't "dealt with" (whatever that means).

Some time ago, this led me to try to come up with ways I could approximate the virtues of inbox zero, without being able to get there. One approximation is obviously, like, "inbox four", or whatever. Another is "inbox zero since date D". A combination I am fond of is "how old is the oldest e-mail on the first page?", pages being 50 e-mails each.

I track this, along with "total unread e-mails in my inbox", through a simple google apps script daily that writes to a spreadsheet and then draws me a graph. Ask me if you want to know how to set it up, it was simple code-wise but getting Google to let me keep the permissions was surprisingly annoying ("do you trust this developer?" IT'S ME) until I figured it out.

Anyway, today the oldest e-mail on my first page is more than a year old :) I'm at like, "inbox 50 over the last year". There's still some way to go of course, but I'm pleased to have made this much progress, and still in my heart believe that one fateful day the stat will reach infinity as I get down to less than one page of e-mail.