Beautiful Empty Inbox, Meet Fascinating Miro

An empty inbox is a beautiful sight. But if you start obsessing about it, it can become almost as much a distraction as an overcrowded In box.

That's the two-headed lesson I've learned in the past three days of maintaing an empty email in box in my Google gMail account.

GMail checks for new email almost incessantly. If I let myself, I can easily slip into a mode of rushing to my in box just for the purpose of handling, deleting and archiving incoming messages so the in box stays pristine. I guess I'm a bit like a recent religious convert: zealous in my desire to be painstakingly faithful to the tenets of my newfound path.

Clearly, however, reinstating the discipline I had toward email when I was a busy Silicon Valley exec, is paying dividends in terms of the time I have available to do other more productive work. Unfortunately, the zero-tolerance inbox principle has collided with the wow-Miro-is-cool principle, with a net loss of productivity the result.

Sigh.