Response

You may wonder how I could keep my inbox empty.

To me, that’s simple: I have an obsessive habit of responding to every mail as soon as I receive it, and then do away with it as an archive item.

For sure I always have a few emails that need elaborated response and I have to keep in a handy place. (Most of them are submitted research manuscripts that are sent back by the editors for revision.) As a rule I put them as the “star” items under Gmail – and the decision of putting up an asterisk is never taken lightly. I always try to do away with every star as soon as possible. (At this moment I have five.)

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Don’t get me wrong. I’m not implying my method of handling mail is superior. In fact it is quite the other way round. From a pragmatic point of view, most of the emails that we receive – even after filtering out spam – do not deserve any attention. The best strategy is, paradoxically, leaving them unopened in the inbox. The simple act of putting them into the trash takes up too much valuable time that could be better spent.

The great pioneer of this practice is GS, one of our professors of infra-diaphragmatic medicine. In short, he hardly ever replies to any email.

I call him a walking black hole of communication.