I would hate that myself. I much prefer email to phone conversations. My reason is that often times the people I am dealing with are scattered across 2 countries and a bunch of timezones. We are all farmers and the needs of the farm and animals are not easy to schedule. The problems and questions are dealt with by me asynchronously via email whereas with a phone conversation I’d have to take copious notes, then revisit it all when I am at my computer and could look up stuff. In many cases the issues involve pedigreees or details about registered sheep and the exact spelling of the name is critical to get the right animal. Think Bryn, Brynn, and Brynne and there may be 4 or 5 flocks that each use that as a sheep name so the real true name could be Desert Weyr Bryn, or Burp Hollow Bryn and when you’r talking genetics it really matters which is which. Getting that in writing means faster more accurate results back to the person with the question.
This prompted me to look at what I consider inboxes vs what i conside Someday/maybe lists.
Task management - I don’t use the Omnifocus Inbox except for Siri stuff which is then properly processed as soon as I am back at my main computer into the rest of my OF system. So an example is a note I made by asking siri to remind me that sheep tag number 1680 was lost and mom was across the pasture ingnoring the baas. I’ll note it as a downcheck on the mother because she lost her lamb. So it’s at zero within hours of gettign something in it.
Notes - I have an inbox in both my Obsidian vault and my main notebook DEVONThink Database. The DT one gets emptied for sure at least once a week and I try to get it emptied at the end of each day but often the things sitting in there at the end of the day are Rich Text clippings that need to be annotated. Obsidian right now is huge because I’m moving things into it from DT and using that as an opportunity to totally revisit everything I put in there. Some stuff sits in the Obsidian inbox for a long time as I decide how to adapt it to Markdown and what to do with it. Since I am also playing with my Obsidian structure and workflow I’m not too concerned about that at this time. Once this conversion and structure process is done I expect the Obsidian inbox to be emptied pretty much every day as well.
Slack/Discord teams - I have 1 slack channel that I am in that is for my Mastermind group and it gets reviewed several times a day. I don’t use Discord except under duress when I need an immediate answer to something as I am working. I don’t like real time conversations in general and find that sort of real time chat disrupting. I prefer forums like this where I can hold a conversation without caring about timezones or locations.
Forums - I follow several forums and check most of them daily. They include MPU, the Black Welsh Mountain Sheep forum, GTD Connect and Linking Your Thinking. If I am dealing with a problem or issue I check forums like the Obsidian, DEVONThink, Zotero, Lightroom Queen or others as needed. I don’t really consider them inboxes as I can dump all of my forums and have if other work takes precedence. The only one that is critical that I must check daily is the Black Welsh one because I am the administrator.
Social networks - I don’t use social networks. I am on Twitter and post there but I only go and read it if I feel I have time. So maybe once or twice a week I’ll look at stuff. I use Tweetdeck and have the people I “follow” sorted so I can quickly get to the the few I care about. Don’t use any other social networks. I can leave Twitter unread for months and just pick up where I left off. No need toscroll and read anything there.
Reading Lists are not inboxes. I keep a long list of books I want to read that are new and one of books I want to re-read but that is more like a Someday/Maybe list than an inbox. I never expect it to ever be at zero. I don’t use any save for later reading apps for web stuff. Either I go read it when I read the news (max 1/2 hour a day) and if necessary I’ll clip the resulting article as a reference if I want to keep it but I never mark it for reading later.
RSS feeds - none
Messages - Again not an inbox. I deal with all text messages at my first available opportunity. I don’t use whatsApp or anything other than standard messages on the iPhone. Often the people I correspond with use text messages in place of phone calls again because of the asynchronous nature of the interaction and because there is a clear written trail of what was said which is very important to me. So I treat them like a ohone call and deal with them as soon as my hands are free.
Physical inboxes: I really only have 1 and I get it to empty at least once a week.
An Inbox that you didn’t include is the Safari Bookmarks list. When I an researching something I often read a lot and quickly save bookmarks of useful web pages into the Safari bookmark list. At the end of the project or the section of the project that I was researching I go through it and either delete them, add them to a note in DEVONThink as project support material, clip the article for project support or make a specific note with a subset of a web page (like for code snippets) So my Safari inbox gets to zero on an irregular basis. I do also make sure that at least once a month I go in and clean any trash out of it that is not part of an ongoing project.
I do consider inbox zero or at least well processed inputs a critical function. I try to allow about 2 hours a day to process new inputs into my systems. Right now during lambing I’m lucky to get an hour a day in and things are starting to pile up. It looks like we have a lambing lull with no ewes expected to lamb in the next day so I’ll make a concerted effort to fully process everything today.
