My Inbox will never be empty but that is a success

Steps to email enlightenment.

0. Spend five minutes reading Inbox Zero, Getting Things Done, or other quick and dirty tips for dealing with masses of incoming email.

Status: SUCCESS.

1. If there is a large backlog in the inbox, purge it to another folder to deal with later.

If you DO have time to work through the backlog, or at least triage it for the most urgent stuff, you can do it when it's neatly categorised in another folder. If you DON'T then honestly, you were only going to do stuff you remembered to do anyway, and having the email somewhere where it doesn't clutter up incoming email is strictly better.

Status: SUCCESS.

2. Separate "email I haven't read yet" from "email I need to do something about".

This one change is dramatic. Many (though not all) people use their inbox as a todo list, and having 20 items they can't quite remember what they need to do clutters up their mind.

Have a separate folder for "incoming mail" and "mail I need to do something about". When mail comes into "incoming mail", read it and do one of:

(a) if it's knowledge you need to be aware of but not act on, read it and archive it, methodically if necessary, although honestly, if you use gmail, just hit "archive" and only tag it if you think you won't be able to search for it again
(b) it it's irrelevant, archive it or delete it
(c) if it requires a short reply ("sorry, I'm busy" or "I don't know and don't have time to find out, but try googling for [keyword]") send it now
(d) if it requires longer reply, put it in a folder for that.
(e) if it needs a longer reply, but honestly, you're never going to have time, send an explanation of that now and archive it. If you DO have time, you can do it later. But there's no point giving yourself false expectations.

The one rule I found was to ALWAYS put email to be acted on into the "need action" folder. Even if it's really urgent and important, put it into the action folder. If you leave it in the incoming mail so you "don't forget" you'll never do ANYTHING with the action folder. If EVERYTHING goes in the action folder, you HAVE to look in it.

Currently, I have three action folders: social, tasks, and job. And I fall behind sometimes when I'm busy or stressed, but the key mantra is that when I start to catch up it's easier to triage the backlog into replies and into those folders and into oblivion than to try to deal with it ad hoc.

Status: SUCCESS

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Conclusion

In some sense, I am comparatively successful at having an archetypal empty inbox. In another sense, I never will, because even if I'm organised, there will be some tasks pending for this day, week or month, which currently means in my "incoming email" even if not in my inbox, so I need to redefine success, because the system, even when it works smoothly, is never going to be in a state of "I don't need to deal with any emails/tasks".

Some questions are important because they may be true, some because you can't see WHY they're false

If someone proposes an abstract argument with apparently impeccable premises and yet a difficult-to-accept conclusion (eg. Pascal's wager), it may be interesting for two reasons.

(1) There may be a serious chance it's true and you need to decide if it's valid or not, and whether or not you need to start accepting the conclusion.

(2) You may be pretty sure the conclusion is false, because you have watertight reasons you trust more than this argument however superficially plausible, but you can't understand WHY this argument is wrong, and want to do so, in order to rebut similar arguments made by yourself and others in the future.

It's normally clear which category something falls into, although we often don't explicitly say that. (1) is probably more important, if it involves ACTUALLY changing your mind about something, but saying "that's false" is not a reason to stop thinking about it if you can't explain WHY it's false.

For instance, in a recent discussion on free will, I realised that I was reasonably sure that (a) what choices I make in the future are inherent in the current state of the universe and my brain and (b) in general we should definitely ACT as if we have free will and it will Just Work. That pretty much settles the practical questions in my mind. But the questions of how to deal with what everyone believes about it, and what everyone feels about it, are still very much there.

Free Will

In a recent discussion about free will, I asked the rhetorical question, "What would a universe WITHOUT free will be like? How would it be different?" I expected that to be unanswerable, but Liv inadvertently did give an answer.

She reminded me of the Benjamin_Libet experiments, which seemed to show some actions which we supposed to be of conscious volition were actually instigated unconsciously prior to any conscious recognition of the decision. Now, there are any number of quibbles with whether the experiments actually show anything relevant or not, but that's not actually very relevant to the point, because it seems exceptionally plausible that some decisions are made instinctively and have a rational justification tacked on only once it's under way.

However, it also seems likely that that's not always the case. There are pages of discussion on places like lesswrong.com about when it's best to decide instinctively, and when it's best to make explicit the reasoning process in order that every aspect of the decision is palatable to the conscious mind (even if some of them are subjective).

Liv also made the point that if my subconscious is part of me, I can't complain it's not me making the decision, although I argued that I might still object it wasn't free will if I was deciding for instinctual reasons and not the reasons I thought I was deciding for.

Having imagined a scenario where we don't have free will (in at least some ways), actually made me much more optimistic, and much more willing to use "free will" to describe the situation we're actually in (whereas previously I would have doubted "free will" having any meaning AT ALL, as I couldn't imagine any meaning of "me" other than "what makes my decisions" making the concept rather redundant).

On the other hand, having imagined a scenario where we don't</> have free will (in at least some ways), I am even less inclined to argue that the inability to delegate the decision to a mythical, spiritual, intangible, unfalsifiable "actual" us, rather than the actual physical us, is a drawback to free will.