When was the last time you saw your mailbox EMPTY? Seriously — end your day without having a single e-mail waiting for you and being able to start fresh the coming day?

A trivial question, some would say, doesn’t matter if you have 1000 or 0 e-mails in your mailbox, you can always only read the ones that matter to you and ignore the rest, right?

Well, according to psychologists your over-flooded inbox might actually be the number one reason for your decreased productivity. Nothing wrong in being informed, but the amount of information that is being bombed at you every day simply exceeds your brains capacity to process it. Much too often we become paralyzed by knowing too much and not being able to decide anymore what is truly important for us.

When you think about it then checking your e-mail is the single most common habit that your parents didn’t have — yet for you logging in into your mailbox and browsing your e-mails has become so automatic and frequent that you rarely even ask WHY or consider seriously HOW you’re going to process the information that you find.

If you’re like most of the people then you almost never end your day with having 0 e-mails in your inbox. Most likely you have some e-mails that you’ve read, a whole bunch you haven’t read and don’t intend to either, some that you’ve actually written a reply to — and some you just don’t know what to do with (you probably decide to read them in the future — which almost never happens).

It’s a mess! And it’s cutting down your productivity more than anything else.

Fortunately there’s a way how to turn this disguised energy vampire into a well-tamed pet of yours, in other words: how to create a simple system that reduces significantly the time your spend in your inbox and gives the control over the information you consume right back to you.

It’s called the 0-inbox system.

A productivity expert Merlin Mann explains the system in his highly insightful presentation. According to Mann the 2 most valuable resources that you have are your attention and time. You have a limited number of hours and minutes every day and no matter how much you’d like you can’t add anything extra to it.

So Mann asks a question: “What is most important to you?” No matter what’s your answer — your family, project you’re working on right now, your cat — your mailbox actually reflects your priorities. If someone would check what has been going on in your mailbox in the past couple of weeks that person could tell a lot about where your actual priorities lie.

This is how crucial it is to actually have your inbox under YOUR control — not in the hands of all those people who are mailing you every day.

If you still feel that having 0 e-mails — and yet having all the important things done — is rather daydreaming, you might find Mann’s ideas sort of revolutionary. However as with most of the good things in life — they’re rather simple and obvious.