I have too many inboxes.

Personal email, work email, Slack, WhatsApp, Jira, my to-do list, my calendar, and various other systems that keep asking for my attention.

Some are even inboxes within inboxes. A task that looked manageable yesterday can accumulate three new things to do by tomorrow.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done introduced me to the powerful idea of getting your inbox to zero.

And zero feels wonderful.

There’s something deeply satisfying about having nothing waiting for you. Nothing forgotten. Nothing quietly accumulating in the background.

The trouble is, some of these inboxes are an uphill battle.

No matter how much I process, more arrives. Sometimes faster than I can handle it.

Still, I’ve had some victories.

I’ve managed to bring a monitoring system down to zero when taking responsibility for it. I’ve finally completed annoying tasks that had been hanging around for ages. I’ve automated my receipt collection, removing much of that recurring chore from my life.

And then there’s my daily reset at home: dishes, laundry, garbage. Every evening, I try to bring the house back to something resembling zero.

Of course, by tomorrow, there will be more dishes.

And that’s where things get interesting.

Some queues can be cleared once and forgotten. Others need to be cleared every day. Some can be automated away. And some seem to grow faster than I can ever hope to empty them.

Perhaps the mistake is treating all of them the same way.

Getting to zero is satisfying, but staying at zero isn’t always the point.

For some things, success means reaching zero once. For others, it means developing a routine that makes zero achievable again and again.

And for the truly overwhelming queues, perhaps the real challenge is finding ways to reduce the incoming work, rather than endlessly becoming better at processing it.

I’m starting to think that zero isn’t just a productivity goal.

It’s a way of asking whether the systems running my life are actually working.

And sometimes the greatest achievement isn’t clearing the queue.

It’s making sure it doesn’t become an uphill battle again.