I’ve always liked how Merlin Mann transformed Inbox Zero (an ideology? a methodology?) from it’s original focus on email into a more holistic philosophy of attention, helping people with Things To Do to manage (i.e. limit) the number of tasks or distractions that knock us off track. Easier to say—chasing the right zero, as he puts it, but he says it well.
For me, the real ‘zero’ in Inbox Zero is more about consciously managing the amount of our attention that we commit (or, far more often, cede) to thinking and worrying about what may or may not be piling up while we’re away doing the real work of our lives. Which is to say: the Real Work that’s not, in this instance, about fiddling with email or drearily suffering the daily fusillade of random requests and information bombs that get lobbed our way.
Put to best use, Inbox Zero is merely a philosophical practice of learning to be parsimonious about which and how many inputs we allow into into our lives—and, then, to responsibly but mindfully tend to those inputs in a way that is never allowed to hinder our personal commitment to doing the work that really matters to us.