How to Achieve Inbox Zero

Introduction

In last week’s post I made the case for Inbox Zero: that is, for being so on top of your email that your inbox is virtually empty (say, a dozen or fewer emails). To recap, Inbox Zero is about being more effective with email, meaning you’ll possibly read less of it, definitely re-read much less of it, and stop missing important emails because they were buried under all the unimportant ones. The goal is to make better use of our time, so that we spend less of it doing email. In this post, I am going to explain exactly how to achieve and maintain Inbox Zero, based on how I’ve managed it for the last several years.

[A note on the art above: a concerned reader was aghast at my use of A.I. to create the art for last week’s post. She was so keen to keep it real, she created this original art just for me—and you.]

One prerequisite

There is an important prerequisite to achieving Inbox Zero, at least the way I do it: you have to use Gmail as your email interface. This doesn’t mean you have to use a Gmail account. (More on this later.) Now, I’m not some major Google fanboy, and they didn’t sponsor or promote this post (or this blog) in any way. Google makes its money through ads, and I’m not big on advertising. I also don’t appreciate how their YouTube algorithm tried to addict me to sexy yoga videos. Moreover, I bristled at the original Gmail because the consumer version, when it came out, had ads that were generated based on its bot reading the email message content. This so unnerved me, I created a technique to stymie it. But Google eventually ditched the ads, probably after reading this blog and realizing I was right. (Yes, that was a joke.) But now I’m sold on Gmail.

When my employer switched to Google Workspace, and Gmail became a part of my daily life, I realized not only that its conversation view is much more efficient, but that the use of labels instead of folders makes all kinds of sense. In fact, labels are the key to maintaining Inbox Zero. So if you’re still committed to using Outlook, this post isn’t going to be of much help.

If you don’t use Gmail, don’t stop reading! If you’re not among the 76% of Americans who use Gmail for their personal email, you can still keep your Yahoo or Hotmail account, and set up the Gmail interface (both on your laptop and your Android app) to pull in email from either (or both) of those platforms. The Gmail interface works great for my personal email (which is on my own domain, via the Yahoo/Turbify platform), along with my Gmail, of course. It’s nice to get everything in one place.

(I’m not going to explain how to port your Yahoo or Hotmail over to Gmail … that kind of task is what ChatGPT is for. It did a great job guiding me through the process. When one of its instructions doesn’t work—which will happen, as these interfaces undergo minor changes all the time—ChatGPT can course-correct very well. In fact, if you told ChatGPT, “I am having trouble with the POP3 settings because my neighbor is having a huge party and they’re making too much noise,” GPT will help by asking, “Would you like me to draft a speech or brief note that you can present to ask them to quiet down?” And if upon reading this draft you respond, “The note needs to be shorter and more emphatic because I want to write it in Sharpie on my husband’s bare chest,” GPT will accommodate that request as well. So, you may now wonder, why wouldn’t you just ask ChatGPT how to get to Inbox Zero? The answer is, because it’s only really good at rote technical configurations, not at strategy. Yet.)

My Inbox Zero strategy

As with all techniques for everything, there are five steps to reaching and maintaining Inbox Zero. No, this methodology won’t get you to where you literally have zero emails in your inbox, but when you start doing start-of-day triage and some catch-up throughout the day, you’ll get to where most of the time you’ll have relatively few. The crucial thing is to have no more  in your inbox than Gmail’s first page can display. The default is 50 threads. Anything that doesn’t fit on this first page is guaranteed to be neglected, because the chances of you ever seeing it are negligible. (Sure, you could find those emails with the search feature, but how will you know to search if you don’t know the email exists? Do you routinely search on “invoice past due”? Or are you waiting for someone to say, “What? You didn’t see my email?” so you can search on their address?)

With no further ado, here are the steps.

Step #1 – Create a few filters and a couple of new labels

This step is mainly necessary for your work email, and is optional if you work for a small business. But if you work for a large corporation, you surely get a ton of email that’s broadcast daily from HR, your marketing department, news feeds, vendors, and various other non-personal sources. You are generally not expected to respond to these emails, so they should definitely be considered lower priority. They shouldn’t compete for precious visible-inbox real estate with any email that a human took some trouble writing.

Thus, you should create filters that target the daily all-hands update emails and filter them out such that they don’t even hit your inbox. Since these messages are not as useless as direct marketing solicitations, you’ll want to also label them (automatically!) in case you need to find them later. Figure out how many labels you need: you might have a “Corp updates” label and another for “Industry news,” or you might just have a catch-all for “Bulletins etc.” Now, I know filtering out emails so they never hit your inbox can seem scary, but bear in mind two things. One, if you haven’t been doing Inbox Zero, lot of emails have always been invisible to you anyway, by being buried among others and/or not on the first page of your inbox. Two, you can always peek at the mass of unfiltered emails by clicking the “All Mail” link down the left of your screen:

(If you don’t see this “All Mail” link it’s because Gmail has hidden it; click the “More” link to expose it. In the snapshot at left, the view is expanded so there’s a “Less” link; that’s where the “More” link would be shown if this view were collapsed.)

For your personal email, the first filter should get rid of unasked-for solicitations like the daily email you get from Speedo because you once bought that bathing suit from them (you know, the one that didn’t even fit so you returned it). Filter out all these quasi-spammers—the companies you did choose to do business with who are now like remoras. (Myself, I have a Hotmail account that I use for all e-commerce so I can more easily ignore that spam. If I need to file a receipt I log into the Hotmail, find it, and forward it to my personal email. Otherwise I ignore Hotmail entirely; it’s at Inbox 48,376.)

With these various filters in place, at least you’ve somewhat mitigated the fusillade of daily emails, hopefully reducing it to under fifty so that facing your Inbox for daily triage will be less daunting.

Next, if this is your work email, create a label that is your boss’s name, and set up a filter that applies this label to each of this person’s emails to you—without removing the email from your Inbox. Make this a bold, perhaps red label. If you’re lucky and your boss is named Aaron, this label will automatically show up at the top of your list of labels (which is also your list of folders … more on this later). If your boss’s name isn’t Aaron, put an underscore character at the beginning to move it up. Going forward, instead of starting your workday by perusing your inbox, you can start in your “Boss” folder (or, if your emails don’t pile up too fast, you can still start in the inbox and just look for that bright red label.) The idea here is that the very first emails you should read are the ones from the person who has direct influence on your salary. In the below example, the person’s boss is named Zoe, so two underscore characters are required.

You’ll also want to create a label called “_Follow-up.” Make this a bright color, too. The underscore character before the “F” is to move this label to(ward) the top of the list. The “_Follow-up” label is important for both your work and personal email … more on this later.

Does it make sense to automatically flag emails from your spouse, the way you did with your boss? Perhaps, but only if you get a lot of email from him or her. (Mine just yells across the house, like me.)

Again, ChatGPT can walk you through how to set up the actual filters and create and color-code the labels. All kinds of helpful people have already documented this process in various forums etc., so ChatGPT can research and distill that process for you.

Step #2: Clean slate

Obviously if you’re currently buried in thousands of emails after years of neglect, you’ll need to start with something other than mere triage … it’s a little late for that. To achieve a clean slate, take a deep breath and ask yourself what the odds are that you’re really going to ever read emails 51 through 25,359 in your inbox. Once you have accepted that the answer is “hell no,” you need to just archive them all, in one fell swoop. First navigate to your inbox. Then find the little checkbox just below the “Search mail” field at the top of the Gmail interface. If you hover your cursor over it, a tool-tip will appear that says “Select.” Check that box to select the first 50 emails, or better yet, accept the offer to select all 25,359 of them (i.e., however many you have total). Then click the icon next to the checkbox that looks like a folder with a down-arrow on it, as shown below. This will archive all selected messages, which means they’ll no longer be in your inbox. Where do they go? Into the ether. Probably the same place electricity goes when you turn out the light. They’re still on the mail server, though, and you can still see them by selecting “All Mail” as described above. But you don’t need to see them. They’re dead to you. Get on with your life.

[A note on the screenshots in this post: some are a bit hard to read. Click on a picture to enlarge it.]

The only problem with that mass archival is that nothing is labeled, so it’ll be hard to find past emails. That’s the consequence of waiting this long to get organized. Proper implementation of Inbox Zero means being organized going forward, not just clutter-free. Thus, once you have zero emails in your inbox (or maybe half a dozen new emails since they continuously pop up out of nowhere), you need to do regular triage on all the new stuff.

Step #3: Triage and pre-labeling

Okay, let’s assume you now have a clean slate and an inbox that doesn’t represent years of neglect. When you open Gmail first thing in the morning, you’ll likely still see dozens of emails, and you’ll start to panic, but don’t. Just follow these rules in making your way through the pile.

Start with the boss. Remember that new filter you created that automatically labels emails from your boss? Read those first. (If this is your personal email, and you created a rule to automatically flag messages from, say, your kid who’s a terrified college freshman, start with those.)

Jettison spam. If you see spam or quasi-spam messages, delete them on sight. You can go down the list of threads selecting all the chaff via the checkbox, then click the garbage can icon on your toolbar. This is incredibly satisfying. If you’re seeing a lot of spam from a single source, create a filter to kill it off forever. (Zap Zappos! See ya later, Speedo!)

(I had to cheat with the snapshot above … that’s a view of the Promotions tab, where Gmail automatically moves the quasi-spam solicitations. If you don’t see inbox tabs like Promotions, Social, and Updates, enable them in Settings/Categories.)

Scan for important messages first. Scan through the subject lines for anything that looks important, like one from a friend you’re making plans with, or a work colleague you’re knee-deep in a project with, or a thread you’ve been working that has new activity, and open that first. Scanning never worked before, because you had too many emails. Now it’s actually a reasonable way to triage.

Pre-label your threads. For every email you open, all you’re doing right now is skimming it to judge its level of importance, and—crucially—labeling it. This is the most important rule: don’t wait until later to “file” it. Label it now, and it’ll kind of almost be filed already. (More on the “why” of this in a minute.) Note that you’re not moving this using the very obvious button on the tool bar (i.e., the one shown below). That will remove the thread from your inbox. You want to label it while leaving it in the inbox, for this triage phase.

Instead of clicking “Move,” click on the three-dot “kabob” icon (if you hover over it, a tooltip will tell you it’s the “More” icon) and select “Label as” from the drop-down menu. It’ll show you a list of all your labels, and you can either just scroll down and find the right label, or you can start typing the name of a label and it’ll zip right to it. Click on the label name, if you’re only applying one label, and you’re done.

You won’t need to bother with the kebab menu if you switch to the advanced toolbar. Here’s how to switch:

Then you’ll have a dedicated button to apply a label without moving the thread:

The great thing about labels in Gmail, vs. folders in platforms like Outlook, is that you can apply more than one label to an email thread. That way, it’ll show up in multiple folders. Well, not folders exactly … that’s the confusing thing about labels in Gmail. Yes, they label message threads, but they also act like folders. (Kind of like how light is both a particle and a wave.) When it comes to classifying a thread, you’re applying labels. But labels act like folders when you’re at the main Gmail screen and want to navigate your threads. It’s like your threads can be in two or more folders at once.

Let me give you an example. Several of my friends and family members like beer as much as I do. We send each other Beck’sts, which are beer-themed emails (click here for details). Often one Beck’st begets another, and we have stirring dialogues not just about our beers, but about other topics like being middle-aged, being a parent, etc. (Oddly, a fair bit of my modern correspondence begins with a Beck’st.) Since these threads aren’t just about beer, but also about friends and family, I want to label them accordingly. So I select “Label as” from the drop-down, and check boxes next to all the appropriate labels:

When I’m done, the thread will have all the labels it needs. This means I can hunt for it in my brother B—’s folder, or my friend D—’s folder, etc. If I remember, for example, that D— wrote me about becoming a grandpa, I can search on “grandpa” in his folder whether or not I remember (years from now) that he announced this via a Beck’st.

(Sometimes, you’ll have labeled and archived—i.e., filed—a thread only to receive a new response to it, perhaps from someone on the distro who hadn’t chimed in before. The thread will show up in the Inbox again, at which point you can add the new correspondent’s label to it.)

Remember, you don’t maintain Inbox Zero by taking action on every email right away—you’re just labeling it during triage when this is so easy to do. Triage consists of figuring out whom the email is from, and what it’s about (if you bother to file/label emails by topic). You’re labeling it now, so you never have to revisit it again. Then you can actually get some work done, knowing the most important emails have at least been read and you know what’s waiting for action. Disorganization is distracting!

Again, the pre-labeling is the game-changer … if you try to file emails later, you’ll waste gobs of time re-reading each thread to try to remember what it’s about. Label it the first time you see it, as this will only take seconds. Then, filing later is just a matter of jettisoning it from your inbox.

Flag for follow-up.  If an email will obviously require a reply or some other action, don’t just label it by sender and/or topic—also apply the “_Follow-up” label you created in step #1. Some email is just information, and some needs action. This is the best way to differentiate. Also, by selecting the “_Follow-up” label/folder, you’re basically creating a to-do list of emails requiring action. 

To add to my exhortation to pre-label, the key difference between an email folder (like Outlook uses) and the labels that Gmail uses is that a label doesn’t, by itself, move the email. It just gives it an identity that will persist forever (unless you decide to un-label it). A labeled email is breathtakingly close to being a filed email … all you have to do is get it out of the inbox (by archiving it, or removing the “Inbox” label, which amount to the same thing).

Step #4: Archive messages

Once you’ve read or at least scanned all the emails in your inbox, it’s time to tackle the ones you labeled “_Follow-up.” Since this (probably) won’t be that many threads, you can see them all at once (perhaps by clicking the “_Follow-up” folder, or just eyeballing them in the non-overrun inbox), and decide which are the highest priority. Once they’re dealt with, you can remove the “_Follow-up” label and archive them. If there are emails remaining in your inbox, perhaps a few of them should stay there (to be visible for a while, even if they don’t require action) but others can be archived right away, and all of them eventually. (There’s really no point leaving them in your inbox forever, especially when they’re already labeled.)

There are two ways to archive (i.e., file) email threads: the Archive button, and removing the “Inbox” label. Here’s how you’d archive via the button:

Or, you can click the little “x” on the “Inbox” label; now this message will no longer appear in the inbox.

This second method has the benefit of being applicable across labels. For example, it’s how you’d remove the “_Follow-up” label after action is taken. So when you think your inbox is getting out of hand, you can start at the bottom and work your way up, deciding when it’s time to click the “x” next to the “Inbox” and/or “_Follow-up” labels as appropriate. When you’re done, not only will you be closer to Inbox Zero, but you’ll have made great progress in your filing. If you get behind on that, but realize 20 of your emails are no longer timely, you can just check them all and click Archive. Since they already had labels, they’re now correctly filed, and you didn’t have to reopen them!

A final note on labels: I recommend that, upon sending an email that is not a response (i.e., starting a new thread), you go into your Sent items and slap a label on the message. For example, when I send a Beck’st, I’ll label it, so that even if nobody responds it’ll still show up in my Beck’st folder. And if somebody does respond, his response will already be labeled.

Step #5: Segregate email accounts (optional)

It’s not uncommon to juggle multiple email accounts. Over the past few years, I’ve had my personal email in Outlook; my high school mountain bike coaching emails on a different address, also in Outlook; and my Gmail, which is non-work business email (e.g., LinkedIn stuff). Now I’ve collapsed all three into my Gmail interface, to take advantage of all the features described above.

That said, I still like to have my personal email separate from business, so I created a rule that adds an “Inbox – albertnet account” label on all emails addressed to my personal address, and has these messages skip the main (Gmail) inbox. As with my other inbox, messages are automatically labeled as they come in, and then when I’ve responded (or have decided I don’t need to) I archive them by removing the “Inbox – albertnet account” label.

If your Gmail interface manages multiple addresses, you can set any of your addresses as default, so when you create a message it’ll come from that address, unless you manually change it for that thread. When you reply to a message, it will be sent from whatever account received the email, unless you manually change it for that thread.

Conclusion

I’ll grant you this has been a long, complicated post. It might be pretty daunting to imagine embracing this approach. But to recall last week’s post, an Adobe study of 1,000 white collar Americans found that on average they spent 8.9 hours a day between personal and work email … wouldn’t it be nice to streamline this? Wouldn’t you rather learn one methodology that makes you more efficient, than waste valuable time on into the future on this unavoidable activity? I’m here to tell you that I’m far more efficient and effective since I adopted Inbox Zero … you can be, too.

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XVI

Introduction

This is the sixteenth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, and Volume XIV is here, and Volume XV is here. (The different volumes have nothing to do with one another and can be read in numerical order, alphabetical order, in birth order, or in whatever order your Ouija Board advises.)

What are Bits & Bobs, in the context of this blog? They’re like little literary snacks … brief passages from old emails or essays, or things I’d have scrawled on a bathroom wall if I were a vandal. Though generally written to a friend or family member, they’re tidbits I figure my albertnet audience might get a chuckle, snort, chortle, or at least a smirk out of. Read these aloud to your friends, family, colleagues, or a stranger on the phone, ideally a telemarketer. Or copy them onto Post-its and stick them all over your house for inspiration!

January 17, 2005

Welcome to Gmail! I’m glad my special exclusive invitation hit its mark. I hope you consider me kind of elite to have made this new platform possible for you. Of course, it’s hard for me to feel superior when you got a cooler address than I did. Alas, dana.albert is always taken when a new email platform sprouts up. Anyway, as you start using Gmail I entreat you to never click on any of the Adsense “sponsored links” (i.e., ads), lest you help launch a new way to advertise, which is the last thing this country and world need.

Gosh, that’s a less-than-cheery paragraph, I now realize. I’m pretty fed up, I guess. We took the kids to San Francisco today for a nice stroll along the new waterfront, where they’ve restored a wetland. It was absolutely frigid, with a howling cold wind. L— cried continuously. A— had a blast, though: she saw her first helicopter, her first container ship, her first motorboat, and her best (if not first) view of a seagull, quasi-hovering not 10 feet away. Then we went to House of Nanking, where A— pronounced most of the food (scallops excluded) “too spicy,” and L— tore up the place, even flinging food at the couple at the next table. We had to take turns walking her outside. We got home and put both kids to bed, and tried to get a nap ourselves (I’m fighting some bug), but the phone rang every 20 minutes, and no handset was near. So I have half-napped, which is a recipe for grogginess and a sour disposition. So, have a better one!

December 3, 2006

What do I mean by “damn fritjes?” Why, I’m glad you asked! “Fritjes” is a Dutch word, the diminutive of “frites,” which needless to say are fries, as in French fries. There’s a story behind this. When my mom was married to the man who had formerly been her landlord, and whom we thus always called The Landlord, or more precisely The Landlo’, they traveled quite a bit. This was fun for my mom except that the Landlo’ was, well, a total dick. I doubt you could find a single living human who would describe him in any other way. I suppose if he’d met a nun somewhere along the line she’d choose a different description, like “sinfully cruel and unredeemable,” but you get the idea. Anyway, he didn’t really “tour” places, he “did” them. As in, “Do you think we can do the Sorbonne in under twenty minutes?” Travel, to him, was a way to check off all the “been-there” lists. He was terribly impatient in general and I think travel just exacerbated the trait. Anyway, G—, when showing them his adopted country, went for the slow-absorption style that reasonable people tend to favor. The Landlo’ was having none of that. If there wasn’t a famous landmark to be checked off and mentioned later to some disinterested, and doubtless uninterested, third party back home, he wasn’t interested. About the only specific thing on G—’s list was fritjes. He really loves the fritjes in Holland, and for good reason. They really do them right. There are stands all over the place. As far as he (and thus I) know, everybody in the country always orders “frites mit.” That means “fries with.” You’ll be happy to know that there’s no need to specify with what; of course “mit” means “with mayonnaise.” They don’t skimp, either. As far as I can tell, frites mit is about the only luxury that the temperance-addicted Dutch allow themselves, unless you count raw herring.

Anyway, as the Landlo’ dragged my mom and my brother around at his breakneck pace, cussing and looking at his watch every five seconds, poor G— decided to cut his losses and forget every single local attraction he’d planned to show them, except fritjes, since that at least still seemed possible. He reminded the Landlo and our Mom to keep an eye out for a fritjes stand. Finally the Landlo’ decided he (and thus they) were done with Holland and started to drag them back to G—’s place. G— meekly protested that they hadn’t had any fritjes yet, and the Landlo’ blew sky high and gave the poor guy a blistering diatribe about “you and your damn fritjes!” From that moment forward, G— has never called them anything but damn fritjes, and neither has our mom, and once the rest of us heard the story, the name has stuck with all us brothers, kids, nieces, and nephews as well. It’s gradually spreading from there (e.g., to my friends and colleagues). Needless to say, if you ask one of my daughters if she’d like some damn fritjes, she’ll know exactly what you’re talking about. “French fries” might throw her, though.

February 29, 2009

[I sent the following email to a mass audience of family and friends.]

I am pleased to introduce my web log, or as they say in the Internet space, my “blog.” (It is with great trembling thrill I use these élite modern words like “space” and “blog.”) Please stop whatever you’re doing and go—right now!—to www.albertnet.us, and check out my Intro post and my first (real, non-intro) post, “Wrecking the Car.” While you’re there, click the “Follow” button and become an official albertnet follower. To the first person who does this, I will send a spanking new patch kit from biketiresdirect.com, postage-paid. I’ll bet you’re wondering, “What’s in it for me, a man or woman of acclaimed Command Presence, to become a mere follower?” Well, for one thing, when you do this something will be enhanced about your “dashboard.” I was reading about this somewhere but I can’t remember where. Think of being a follower as social and/or intellectual Armor All for your dash. (If you happen to know what a “dashboard” even means in this context, please drop me a note and explain it to me.)

Anyway, the main benefit of following my blog is that you’ll help me gain other followers. Right now I don’t have a single one, and it’s kind of embarrassing. I had hoped that before I turned forty I’d have scores of minions, not just followers, but as so often happens I’m needing to adjust my expectations. By clicking that little button, you’ll be seeding my future success. (Think of me as a virtual busker who doesn’t yet have a single coin in his violin case.) Oh, and please leave comments for me on the page as well. If you don’t have anything nice to say, say something arch.

March 2, 2009

No, I didn’t get a Prius [to replace my 1984 Volvo wagon]. Fuel economy be damned: I’m tired of Priuses. They’re kind dorky and far, far too common. (I used to call Albany the Volvo Belt, but now it’s clearly the Prius Belt.) What we bought is a newer Volvo wagon, about which Robert Frost would write:

Whose car this is I think I know;
It’s not his old grey Volvo, though.
This fly-ass ride is newer, so
I’d have to guess he’s pimpin’ ho’s.

Okay, that was lame, but at least it rhymed. Anyway, the Volvo we have now is a barely used (pre-depreciated, I like to say) V70. I couldn’t get a stick shift model without going to like Miami, which was, alas, out of the question. It’s my first automatic transmission but surely not my last <sniff>.

March 15, 2009

I have a couple of household items I no longer need, that I hereby offer “free to a good home,” as they say.

Item #1 is a Silca floor pump (they call it a “track pump” for some reason), black. It’s less than fourteen years old. It’s made of a Columbus tube (Cromor, their cold-drawn seamless chromium molybdenum tube, in this case non-butted for obvious reasons). The brass chuck is only a few years old. It works okay on presta but shraeder is a pain in the neck. The gauge sort of works, sometimes; its clear cover is gone and the needle does its own thing. The hose leaks at both ends so you have to pump really fast and there’s a constant hissing. It’s possible to repair this pump by cutting off the stretched-out ends of the hose and crimping a fresh, tight section over the chuck and pump base with the little wire doodad. I did this repair a number of times before something in me just died and I couldn’t do it anymore.

I also have a microwave oven by Sharp, and it is. Works great, and you can turn off the beeping. Carousel. Dedicated Hot Dog button (like a macro). Popcorn button (though microwave popcorn should be illegal because it’s gross, and air-poppers work so well). Compu-defrost. Auto-sense. Interactive help menus. It’s eleven years old. The catch? It’s pretty disgusting in there. It’s rusting. There’s an accumulation of food shrapnel on the ceiling and walls that we’ve given up trying to remove. In the heady dot-com days we’d probably have just pitched it, but times have changed and who knows, maybe you belong to a nursery school co-op that wants a dedicated microwave for defrosting mice for its snake. Or for your home. Yours if you want it.

March 16, 2009

You’ve probably read about the shocking revelation that cyclists tend to have poor bone density, because we don’t carry enough weight around on our skeletons. For some reason cyclists, among other very lean athletes, are singled out by these studies. It is true that, statistically speaking, runners suffer far fewer broken collarbones than cyclists do. But some researchers have proposed that this is because runners almost never get driven into the pavement at 30 or 40 mph. I would like to propose a follow-up study comprising a control group of typical runners plus a test group who are subjected to high-speed impacts with asphalt to test their collarbone strength. I think YouTube would be the ideal way to showcase the results.

In light of this disconcerting stuff, I want to share some good news for a change. We’ve all known for a long time that ice cream and cheese are chock-full of calcium. But that’s not the only way forward for bone health. New studies are showing that alcohol suppresses bone-weakening hormones, so we should be including more of that in our diet. Meanwhile, there are minerals such as boron and silicon that occur naturally in beer (more so than in wine) and that also promote bone health.

Below are some links on the great news about beer.

• http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-385602/Drink-beer-beat-crumbling-bones.html
•  http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/490673

Meanwhile, running is hard on the joints, plus I’m no good at it, and it doesn’t give you great belches like beer does. So stop worrying about your bones. Ride your bike and drink your beer (though not at the same time). That’s my 0.71 rubles, anyway…

November 18, 2008

Thanks for the email! Gosh, so much to reply to there. To start: the way you describe the dread you felt when you moved that furniture, worrying that it would crush you? I had to chuckle because that’s how I’ve felt my whole life! At least you have an upper body. “Gosh, I wish I had a cyclist’s body,” said nobody ever. Swimming has been good to you, even if you haven’t done it in years and years. You’ve still got the muscle memory there (literally hundreds of miles of muscle-feeding capillaries that dudes like me lack) so you’ll get it back the moment you go back to the pool or get a rowing machine or whatever. I’m trying to rehabilitate my shoulder still, and I want to add some muscle there to hold everything together now that the ligaments are permanently severed. Maybe when you’re here for Thanksgiving, we can do my little circuit training regimen together (barbells, this weird sport-cord thing, a soccer ball, and a big exercise ball—you’ll see).

But what’s this about cigarettes? You literally smoked a whole pack in one day? What’s up with that? Don’t punish your body, dude, it’s done nothing to deserve that. I assume you’re not planning on smoking during your visit (not in front of my kids, or I’ll stub the cigarette out on your arm!). I’d recommend you quit right now, so if there’s any withdrawal it won’t be distracting you during your vacation.

Wow, I just picked this big booger and flicked it away, and I heard it hit the window. It’s like that sucker had wings.

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Can We Unplug Our Kids? - Part II: Mea Culpa

Introduction

I just read a very distressing New Yorker article, “Has Social Media Fuelled a Teen-Suicide Crisis?” which made me remember an essay I posted here a few months back. In “Can We Unplug Our Kids?” I referenced a new book about the epidemic of mental illness among teens, which cited social media as a main cause, and then I made the case that ahead of any societal interventions to protect teens on social media, parents can help fight the tide by setting appropriate boundaries. I cited my own family’s experience to support this position. Looking back, I realize that my post—by focusing only on my own history—neglected to consider how thorny the issue really is across the spectrum of American families. Now I have a sheepish feeling that my essay, if not outright smug, was naïve and incomplete, with air about it of “let them eat cake.” So I’m revisiting the topic here, to do it better justice.

A bit of background

Having just trashed my first post a bit, I won’t expect you to go (re-)read it now. To summarize, I explained how I guessed that some parents are somewhat complicit in teens’ dependence on smartphones, since the parents can use them as digital leash (i.e., keep tabs on their kids). In return the kids get basically unfettered access to everything these phones bring, including a steady stream of social one-upmanship and algorithm-driven news and gossip. Meanwhile, I asserted, parents themselves often set a poor example with these devices, erring on the side of embracing the always-online culture for fear of missing out. Then I explained the draconian online policies my wife and I enforced to good effect, such as no social media, no gaming, no phone until high school, no smartphone until college, and limits on video streaming and time online. My post explained how this kept my kids from getting sucked too far into the online world, and had the added (and unexpected) benefit of possibly making them more autonomous and resilient as young adults.

Looking back, and especially in light of the recent New Yorker article, I realize my focus was too much on parents and what they can control, without enough examination of the size and complexity of the challenge they’re up against. Sure, my family was up to the challenge, but I didn’t fully grasp how much my own privilege and luck played into that. I hope to shed more light on the larger problem, so that parents who happen to read this can a) cut themselves some slack, and b) understand how important it is that society better regulate this profit-driven online world to take some of the burden off of parents.

Privilege

It’s embarrassing mistaking one’s own privilege for a just, merit-based society. Decades ago I applied for a job and the branch director, who had the final say in hiring me, was the last to interview me. He stood about six-foot-five, and the first thing he said to me was, “You’re tall … I like that!” Obviously he was joking, and I took the joke as a harmless ice-breaker, but over time I’ve come to appreciate that affinity bias is a big deal, and the fact that this director and I could laugh about it really underscored how unfair it was. If I’d been short and he’d joked, “You’re short, but I’ll try to look past that,” I wouldn’t have found it funny at all. I’m reminded of a great New Yorker cartoon (click here and advance to cartoon 10) where a small fish is thinking, “There is no justice in the world,” and a larger fish about to eat him is thinking, “There is some justice in the world,” and an even larger fish, about to eat him, is thinking, “The world is just.”

The ability my wife and I had to set limits on our kids’ online life had everything to do with privilege. If these girls were raised by, say, a single mother working two jobs to make ends meet, they wouldn’t have benefited from nearly as much oversight. My wife was able to stay home with the kids, and thus have all kinds of time and energy to build rapport with them, and read to them, and never needed to use a TV or computer as a babysitter.

Meanwhile, I worked from home part of the time, so I could help set the right example, and have more time with the kids, and (since our one shared family laptop lived down in the home office) could even supervise them somewhat. I had the luxury of requiring them to log, on paper, their online time, and could police this. Moreover, through my job I had a solid understanding of how tech companies market online services, and how concepts like page views, dwell time, and share/forward metrics are used in designing and “improving” their products. I also had enterprise-grade firewall and WiFi equipment, and the know-how to use it, which made it possible to shape and limit my kids’ Internet access.

Obviously not every family enjoys this kind of privilege. This really hit home for me when I read, in the recent New Yorker article, about a couple who lost a daughter to suicide after her torturous experience online, culminating in Instagram’s algorithm sending her suicide-related content. Her mother lamented:

“In the Black community, low-income, where I teach, parents are not educated enough on any type of technology … We [parents] thought we were two well-educated people. I want to educate the parents first and then the students: What’s an algorithm? What do these sites do?”

Here’s an analogy. Suppose the sidewalk between your home and your kids’ school were littered with broken glass, razor blades, and used syringe needles. If you have the time to walk your kids to school, you’d see this for yourself and would take immediate action. If you don’t walk your kid to school, but you’re a connected and concerned parent, perhaps you’d hear about this problem from other parents. Meanwhile, even a totally overworked parent who doesn’t have time to talk to other parents would benefit from the overall community’s awareness of the problem. But social media, unlike my simplistic sidewalk scenario, features threats that are invisible. Addictiveness is built into these products by design, for profit; the algorithms driving teens’ behavior are opaque to anyone outside the industry; and these algorithms care only about increasing dwell time and shares, even if this means sending suicide-themed videos to depressed kids, instead of the phone number for a suicide hotline. How could a typical parent grasp this threat? It is a sad state of affairs that only a parent who has a background in tech, and who has time to read news articles like the one in The New Yorker, knows he needs to inculcate his kid practically from birth on the downside of the online world.

Luck

In my previous post on this topic I also failed to appreciate the role that blind luck played in my family’s navigation of the Internet and social media. For one thing, we got an early start, simply because my brother has kids a fair bit older than mine and I got to learn from their experience. One incident comes immediately to mind. Decades ago, because I wanted personal email with no ads, I bought a service with at least a dozen mailboxes on my own private domain. I used this for my own address, my wife’s, my mom’s, and my mother-in-law’s, and offered it to my brothers and their kids. One of them eventually came to me asking to be set up because, to her great anguish, Google had abruptly shut off her Gmail, deleting her address book and all her stored emails, because they decided nobody under the age of thirteen should have it. (This was probably because of their AdSense context-based ads.) The wrinkle was that Google never know any user’s age until and unless that user tried to sign up for Google+, their fledgling (and ultimately unsuccessful) social media platform that featured an age limit, hence the suddenness of the Gmail lock-out. This abrupt change caused quite a stir on the Internet, and I read—with fascination—the comments that parents put below one of the articles. One outraged parent, lamenting the disruption this caused his daughter, ranted, “My daughter practically lives online!” I couldn’t detect any irony in this statement, so I guess he saw no problem with her behavior, and I found this more than a little spooky.

I was also surprised, although I perhaps shouldn’t have been, that my young niece would blithely sign up for a social media account without thinking to ask her parents, and that if Google+ had accepted her, her parents might not have even known she had the account. This episode got me thinking generally about the ramifications of kids being online, before my own kids were even old enough to participate, which was a really helpful head start. Had I happened to be the firstborn instead of the last, I’d have been blindsided like so many parents.

I also got lucky, as a parent, based on my own approach to popularity and the regard of my peers. My parents were oddballs, and we grew up largely without TV, and my father in particular had an air of superiority which unfortunately rubbed off on me, the upshot being that in elementary school I was nerdy and mostly shy but also a bit arrogant. For example, I was outspoken about hating football, and pooh-poohed other kids for wearing sweatbands on their wrists like their favorite players and for collecting little toy NFL helmets. My shy-plus-slightly-arrogant personality came across as total arrogance, which (in combination with my nerdiness) irritated people and made me an obvious target for bullying. Being a pariah, and then rising above it when I was older, taught me a lot. More than other kids, I think, I realized how tenuous and ultimately pointless popularity was and is, the result being that instead of suffering from FOMO (fear of missing out) like a lot of adults, I have FONMO (fear of not missing out) or perhaps, as one of my nieces puts it, FOFI (fear of fitting in). Thus, I was able to easily model opt-out behaviors for my daughters; my strict policies would have chafed a lot more if I hadn’t walked the walk.

But wait, there’s more. It likely wasn’t just circumstance that biased me against putting very little stock in the feedback loop of social media. I’ve been reading lately about inborn differences in personality around how people respond to social rewards. As detailed here, reward dependence (RD) has been correlated with very specific neurotransmitter system, and “individuals with high RD personalities have a disposition to recognize salient social cues which in turn facilitates effective communication, warm social relations, and their genuine care for others, but these individuals are then disadvantaged in being excessively socially dependent.” My wife self-identifies as being very low-RD, and experience bears that out; she dislikes being the center of attention to the extent that I had to practically beg her even to have a wedding. I’m not much different (for example, I’m perfectly content to labor over this blog even though I receive very little indication that people are even reading, much less enjoying, my posts). So by random chance, we both appear to be predisposed by our brain chemistry to avoid online likes and smileys, which has given us a concerted parenting approach that includes, for example, disallowing social media on our WiFi. Many high-RD parents might naturally assume that the positive feedback their kids get online could be an unalloyed good thing.

On top of all this, reward dependence is thought to be innate and moderately heritable, and indeed my kids strike me as fairly low in RD, just like my wife and me. Thus, the success we’ve had with our restrictive policies may have as much to do with genetic traits as it does with our ability to explain and justify our position on phones and social media. Other parents, with higher-RD kids, might not have it so easy.

My final examination of luck involves the love my wife and I have for reading. We both have had a lifelong appreciation of books that so far nothing—not Netflix, YouTube, podcasts, or social media—has been able to compete with. This made parenting easier because we could enjoy, right alongside our kids, the books that had to stand in for other forms of entertainment. I can honestly and sincerely tell you that I enjoyed all the books I read to my kids, even the earliest ones made of fabric so the hapless kid couldn’t accidently whack himself with it and dent his forehead. It is without exaggeration that I can say I actually looked forward to reading Clifford’s Bathtime —a board book so basic and simple I had it memorized after only like the twentieth reading—every time one of my daughters asked for it. I combed the online used bookstores to buy up the books I’d enjoyed as a boy, like Cowboy Sam, the Moomintroll books, and the William Pène du Bois Otto books, so I could relive them with my kids. While other dads were watching sports on TV or manning the grill, I was sitting in the La-Z-Boy with one or both kids reading Bridget and the Gray Wolves or Hepcat. I realize this behavior is not normal, and in fact (though I probably shouldn’t admit this), half the reason I even wanted kids was to get to read to them from whatever book struck their fancy. I look forward to having grandkids for this very reason, and in the meantime here’s a recent photo of me reading to my great-niece.

In contrast, I once saw a dad reading to his kid in a doctor’s office waiting room, and he was skipping words and even entire sentences, apparently figuring his kid couldn’t tell the difference so why not get through the book faster? I was scandalized and my impulse was to drag the guy outside and beat him. And yet I realize not all parents are that into books, especially kids’ books, and thus they may have a harder time keeping their kids entertained without resorting to laptops, tablets, or a phone. What a random gift, this love of reading. I highly suspect that the sting of a non-digital life was made easier to bear for my children when they could curl up in my lap for a dose of not just dopamine but serotonin, or (later in their childhood) a good discussion of dramatic irony, or a debate about which translation of Nikolai Gogol is superior.

In conclusion

I hope you, too, love reading, since I admittedly rambled a bit just now. Suffice to say, if you are a parent struggling to compete with the endless barrage of images, videos, and messages flooding your kid(s) through their devices, and with this nonstop virtual party they’re attending that you weren’t invited to, just do your best. And, as a voter and a concerned citizen, please also do what you can to help reign in these tech companies who clearly are putting profit above any sense of social responsibility. I realize now that not all parents are in the same position I have been to impose strict limits on their kids’ activities online, and I apologize if my earlier post implied that it all comes down to responsible parenting. The problem is much, much larger than that.

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