Silvia Killingsworth toys around with Inbox Zero, "essentially a rudimentary filing system, popularized by the productivity evangelist and lifehacker Merlin Mann, who founded the blog 43folders.com in 2004." Why Killingsworth is ambivalent about the tool:
For me, Inbox Zero is a coping mechanism for the anxiety created by a constant flux of e-mail: the basic philosophy is "out of sight, out of mind." On the one hand, it feels great not to linger on past conversations; but on the other hand, I forget whole interactions as soon as they’re gone from my screen. I’ve traded short-term memory for a Googleable inbox, which maybe isn’t such a bad thing. As long as you can remember some text from the message, or who sent it, you can call it up in seconds, much like you might Google anything else using keywords on the Internet.
In some ways, the Inbox Zero system is just a game of whack-a-mail—as soon as you reply and archive one thread, up pops another. And what about when you actually reach Inbox Zero? It doesn’t feel like winning. It feels like staring into the abyss.
(Photo by Hyperdashery Badges)
The Dish 