Why an empty inbox? Some users survive for years without ever seeing a message count of zero. Some users have over 2,000 e-mails in their inbox and seemed to feel fine. Their the exception, though most users with a message count in the hundreds do not feel fine about their e-mail.Consider the problems caused by inbox with dozens, or hundreds, of messages:

• It’s easy to forget critical action items, since they’re buried under so many other messages. At best, important e-mails will require reminders (thereby decreasing organizational efficiency); at worst, they will go undone (thereby negating any benefit of e-mail for that action item).
• It takes longer, on average, to reply to an incoming e-mail, since so many other messages are in the inbox awaiting replies already.
• It takes longer to find a specific message. Sorting may not help much, since (for example) a sort by sender may show several messages sent by the same person, all sitting in the inbox.
• A full inbox is stressful to look at, filled with weeks or months of old work to accomplish, messages to reply to (including an apology for being so late), and irrelevant messages to weed out.
• Especially large inboxes are more likely to crash, losing all contents.

The fewer e-mails in the inbox, the less these problems ever occur. An empty inbox, in fact, solves nearly all of them. Users are more likely to reply, or finish an action item, when there are fewer e-mails distracting them; empty inboxes never cause an e-mail program to crash; and best of all, an empty inbox is a delight to look at, reminding users that they are fully caught up in this important area of work.