I had 261,305 unread emails: What I learned from my Inbox Zero experiment

Tuesday 21 April 2026 3:03 am  |  Updated:  Monday 20 April 2026 5:15 pm

After hitting over a quarter of a million unread emails, Anna Moloney turned to a productivity expert for an Inbox Zero intervention. But once the backlog is gone, does digital order actually bring peace?

There’s no inbox shaming here,” says productivity expert Jamie Squires at the beginning of our hour-long email organisation workshop. But that’s the thing, I’m not ashamed. I recently hit over a quarter of a million unread emails and, if anything, I’m rather proud. How important I must be to have received so many missives hoping to find me well.

That figure, which had steadily ticked up over my four years of service at City AM, had been a matter of repute to me. When others complained of drowning in their inboxes, I scoffed. 40,000? 50,000? If only, I purred, reaching for my phone to show them my astronomical figure. The majority would recoil at the very sight, while one Type A colleague audibly yelped, their colour coded online filing system quivering at the thought of merely existing in the same digital ecosystem.

“Ah, the badge of honour,” sighs Squires, jolting me out of my reverie. He knows the type.

Known also as Productive Dynamo, Squires has spent the last decade parachuting into corporations to whip their staff into organisational shape. He boasts testimonials from the likes of Barclays and Astrazeneca, and offers workshops on inbox zero strategies and techniques like time blocking, as well as more intensive 1-1 coaching sessions for real messes like me.

#mc_embed_signup { background: #fff; clear: left; font: 14px Helvetica, Arial,sans-serif; width: 100%; max-width: 600px; margin: 20px 0; } #mc-embedded-subscribe-form { margin: 20px 0 !important; } .newsletter-form-flex { display: flex; gap: 0; align-items: center; margin-top: -10px; } .newsletter-form-flex input[type=”email”] { flex: 1; padding: 2px 10px; border: 1px solid rgb(18, 22, 23) !important; border-radius: 12px 0 0 12px !important; } .newsletter-form-flex input[type=”submit”] { padding: 4px 10px !important; margin: 0 !important; background-color: rgb(18, 22, 23) !important; color: rgb(255, 255, 255) !important; border: 1px solid rgb(18, 22, 23) !important; border-radius: 0 12px 12px 0 !important; } .newsletter-banner-content { margin-bottom: 15px; } .newsletter-banner-content h2 { margin: 0 0 10px 0; font-size: 18px; font-weight: 600; } .newsletter-banner-content p { margin: 0 0 10px 0; line-height: 1.5; } .newsletter-banner-content ul, .newsletter-banner-content ol { margin: 0 0 10px 20px; } .newsletter-banner-content a { color: #0073aa; text-decoration: none; } .newsletter-banner-content a:hover { text-decoration: underline; } .newsletter-banner-content img { max-width: 100%; height: auto; margin: 10px 0; } #mc_embed_signup #mce-success-response { color: #0356a5; display: none; margin: 0 0 10px; width: 100%; } #mc_embed_signup div#mce-responses { float: left; top: -1.4em; padding: 0; overflow: hidden; width: 100%; margin: 0; clear: both; }

“It’s okay if you like living in the chaos,” he says warmly. It’s a double bluff, of course. It’s not okay, and he and I know it. That, after all, is why I’m here.

Finding comfort in email chaos

After reaching my aforementioned inbox milestone (261,305, for the record), I realised my chaos was starting to have consequences. Opportunities passed up, friendly contacts unreasonably ignored. I had begun to find comfort in the number, forever ticking up, for all the wrong reasons: it gave me an excuse not to reply, to turn a blind eye to decisions I didn’t want to make, leaving them, instead, rotting in digital limbo.

And it’s not like I didn’t check my emails. On the contrary, I did so obsessively. My Gmail account always open in a second tab where a click of the refresh button could mask as productivity. In fact, I spent so much time watching the numbers whirring I had started to wonder whether I may actually be addicted to my emails, perhaps the lamest affliction in the world.

They say one of the most powerful things in life is knowing when to ask for help, and this was it.

I called out online for assistance. From type As, inbox whizzes and anyone else who could offer advice or encouragement. This resulted in – oh no – more emails. I found comfort in many of the responses: reassurances that I wasn’t the problem, that an obsession with ‘inbox zero’ was both unhelpful and practically impossible as a long-term strategy. I felt warm and fuzzy, settling back into weeks of passivity, my emails mounting up in the background once again before a reminder I’d already pitched this experiment to my editor snapped me into action.

I waded in and gave Squires a call.

Read more Can AI end the female admin trap? The expert method: Labels, discipline and the two minute rule

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to email management, Squires tells me. Anna Wintour replies to emails as soon as she gets them. Tim Cook wakes up at 4am and spends his first hour of the day tapping out replies. Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett screen their emails through executive assistants. Ryan Holmes uses a system he calls ‘Inbox Bankruptcy’, a setup whereby as soon as his inbox becomes overwhelming he presses ‘delete all’. Anyone important will send a followup, he hopes.

Squires is not an advocate of pressing the big red nuclear button but he is no less rigorous. All emails, he decrees, fall into one of three categories: ACTION (emails that prompt tasks), READING (emails for reference) or WAITING ON (emails pending a response). They should be sorted into these categories and labelled as such. Once you are done with them, they should be deleted or archived. He introduces me to a ‘pause inbox’ extension, which temporarily blocks all incoming emails, in a bid to curb my addiction to the refresh button.

I spend the next week in an organisational frenzy. I have labels, I have order and I have hope. I pledged to Squires that if I could deal with an email in less than two minutes (either by replying or by completing the accompanying task) I would do it right away, and soon realised how many tasks I’d been deferring for no reason at all. It’s freeing not to labour over responses, just to send them, realising that ‘not interested’ and ‘not for now’ are better answers than nothing at all. It made me realise why those in senior positions so often have the most egregious, but efficient, email manner.

I won’t lie to you, I sorted a lot of emails into subcategories where they will never be seen again by human eyes, and indeed I have since abandoned subcategories altogether (preferring instead the simple division of ‘interesting’ (open) and ‘uninteresting’ (archive)). But at least they were out of sight.

Does Inbox Zero bring peace?

Once I’d sorted through the immediate backlog, it was time for the big, round finale. I wasn’t brave enough to ‘delete all’, but Squires told me archiving was a just as effective substitute. I was sad when the time came to wave goodbye to my 261,305 emails. It felt like throwing away a trophy. When I gathered the courage, I got out my camera to film the moment – this, I thought, is worthy of record. Sadly, the computing power to archive 261,305 emails is actually so much that it took almost three hours, the number trickling down as the relics of my importance drifted into the digital ether. I felt a sense of peace as the number reached single figures. I held my breath for the big finish: three, two, one… hold on.

There’s not a zero, there’s no number at all. It just says ‘Inbox’. It was like a punch to the gut.

Ladies and gents let me save you the trouble: inbox zero is a myth. I’d been chasing a dream; but there was no ending, no zero to admire, just a void. I confronted the emptiness like Ishmael before the whale, when, as if on cue, a lifeboat: ‘new email’.

One did survive the wreck.

I clung to it. I’ll read that later, I thought. Inbox zero? All the best.

Anna is books editor at City AM The Magazine and deputy features editor at City AM

Read more Lady Mayor: It’s not right to pretend I’m no different to my male predecessors

Share this article

Similarly tagged content: Sections Categories People & Organisations