After hitting over a quarter of a million unread emails, Anna Moloney turned to a productivity expert for an Inbox Zero intervention. But once the backlog is gone, does digital order actually bring peace? There’s no inbox shaming here,” says productivity expert Jamie Squires at the beginning of our hour-long email organisation workshop.

But that’s the thing, I’m not ashamed. I recently hit over a quarter of a million unread emails and, if anything, I’m rather proud. How important I must be to have received so many missives hoping to find me well.

That figure, which had steadily ticked up over my four years of service at City AM, had been a matter of repute to me. When others complained of drowning in their inboxes, I scoffed. 40,000? 50,000? If only, I purred, reaching for my phone to show them my astronomical figure.

The majority would recoil at the very sight, while one Type A colleague audibly yelped, their colour coded online filing system quivering at the thought of merely existing in the same digital ecosystem. “Ah, the badge of honour,” sighs Squires, jolting me out of my reverie. He knows the type.

Known also as Productive Dynamo, Squires has spent the last decade parachuting into corporations to whip their staff into organisational shape. He boasts testimonials from the likes of Barclays and Astrazeneca, and offers workshops on inbox zero strategies and techniques like time blocking, as well as more intensive 1-1 coaching sessions for real messes like me. “It’s okay if you like living in the chaos,” he says warmly.

It’s a double bluff, of course. It’s not okay, and he and I know it. That, after all, is why I’m here. Finding comfort in email chaos After reaching my aforementioned inbox milestone (261,305, for the record), I realised my chaos was starting to have consequences.

Opportunities passed up, friendly contacts unreasonably ignored. I had begun to find comfort in the number, forever ticking up, for all the wrong reasons: it gave me an excuse not to reply, to turn a blind eye to decisions I didn’t want to make, leaving them, instead, rotting in digital limbo. And it’s not like I didn’t check my emails.

On the contrary, I did so obsessively. My Gmail account always open in a second tab where a click of the refresh button could mask as productivity. In fact, I spent so much time watching the numbers whirring I had started to wonder whether I may actually be addicted to my emails, perhaps the lamest affliction in the world.

They say one of the most powerful things in life is knowing when to ask for help, and this was it. I called out online for assistance. From type As, inbox whizzes and anyone else who could offer advice or encouragement.

This resulted in – oh no – more emails. I found comfort in many of the responses: reassurances that I wasn’t the problem, that an obsession with ‘inbox zero’ was both unhelpful and practically impossible as a long-term strategy. I felt warm and fuzzy, settling back into weeks of passivity, my emails mounting up in the background once again before a reminder I’d already pitched this experiment to my editor snapped me into action.

I waded in and gave Squires a call. The expert method: Labels, discipline and the two minute rule There is no one-size-fits-all solution to email management, Squires tells me. Anna Wintour replies to emails as soon as she gets them.

Tim Cook wakes up at 4am and spends his first hour of the day tapping out replies. Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett screen their emails through executive assistants. Ryan Holmes uses a system he calls ‘Inbox Bankruptcy’, a setup whereby as soon as his inbox becomes overwhelming he presses ‘delete all’.

Anyone important will send a followup, he hopes. Squires is not an advocate of pressing the big red nuclear button but he is no less rigorous. All emails, he decrees, fall into one of three categories: ACTION (emails that prompt tasks), READING (emails for reference) or WAITING ON (emails pending a response).

They should be sorted into these categories and labelled as such. Once you are done with them, they should be deleted or archived. He introduces me to a ‘pause inbox’ extension, which temporarily blocks all incoming emails, in a bid to curb my addiction to the refresh button.

I spend the next week in an organisational frenzy. I have labels, I have order and I have hope. I pledged to Squires that if I could deal with an email in less than two minutes (either by replying or by completing the accompanying task) I would do it right away, and soon realised how many tasks I’d been deferring for no reason at all.

It’s freeing not to labour over responses, just to send them, realising that ‘not interested’ and ‘not for now’ are better answers than nothing at all. It made me realise why those in senior positions so often have the most egregious, but efficient, email manner. I won’t lie to you, I sorted a lot of emails into subcategories where they will never be seen again by human eyes, and indeed I have since abando