I joked the other day about trying to get to inbox inbox zero where I have zero inboxes. I've never had a very high personal email volume, so it's been pretty easy to manage email once I push different kinds of content out of email and into other things. That can mean the blinking red numbers have just moved to another inbox, though.
What other inboxes do I worry about now?
- Leapfrog. Most of my web inboxes are consolidated into Leapfrog (I don't read the TypePad, Tumblr, or Flickr dashboards at least), but I still read Twitter and MLKSHK separately, since they have features that Leapfrog doesn't expose. I was mulling if Leapfrog should start to filter, so you don't have to see everything, but that would be a big departure from the current functionality so I don't know.
- Stellar. Cool stuff shows up here. Leapfrog should probably consume the flow feed, but Stellar doesn't provide an API for identifying the viewer so it'd need a custom account-adding UI. I'd especially want to use this data if Leapfrog were to filter, but the feed doesn't include any information on who starred the item into your flow, which it would need. (The favorites data is too large a set to collect myself just to filter with, since to filter for me I would have to fetch the favorites of each person I follow.)
- Google Reader. I still read web feeds separately from Leapfrog (though I subscribe to TypePad and Tumblr blogs through those accounts so they go there instead). A lot of these are headlines to skim, but I do read some articles (and some end up in Instapaper). This skimstuff would definitely be Sparks if I used Fever. Reader also holds some web comics and some podcasts.
- Instapaper. Oh geez there is so much instapaper.
- VHX. VHX is an instapaper of web video, so things get stuck there too when I don't have time now, and they accrete in much the same way.
- Podcasts. This is what I've been working most to shave down lately. After hovering at 70–100 episodes usually, I cut out everything past-me thought sounded great and now-me never wanted, so right now I have three unlistened podcast episodes in iTunes. In practice podcasts happen a little through Google Reader: there are some podcasts I listen to only occasionally, so I put them in Google Reader, then add any particularly interesting episodes to Huffduffer. Episodes I see linked on the web also go there, so I don't have to add the feed to iTunes and feel obligated later.
- Books. Besides aspirational additions to Goodreads, I did somehow end up with a few actual ebooks I already have that I haven't even started on. So that's something else to spend time on.
- Netflix. I'm down to 60-ish items in the queue, but a few of them are TV shows that would properly count for more. I should probably take the same severe knife to the queue as I used on podcasts and toss everything that sounds good but just doesn't matter. (Hulu might deserve a mention here but I'm not subscribed to any current shows so it's at least on hiatus.)
- Video games. As much as I like certain aspects of games, there is so little time to play them.
It's hard to tell how to eliminate some of these without radical changes. Do I decide I'm not a Netflix sort of person, so I can read more instead? Can I subsume some of my behavior into Leapfrog with clever changes?
As I found with podcasts, the only proven strategy is to be more discriminating with how I spend time, so that I can spend it how I like. That will always be a challenge, by definition: when the whole point of an inbox is to find what's good, searching only what you know in advance gets you nothing.