So the Inbox Zero (and Getting Things Done, which is basically the overlying philosophy) is basically for people for which the status quo doesn&#x27;t work. If you&#x27;re able to manage your data without an empty inbox, that&#x27;s great!<p>But if you&#x27;re &quot;suffering&quot; from your e-mail, Inbox Zero is great for a couple reasons:<p>- The rules are simple. Read it, then archive, reply immediately, or archive it but put &quot;reply to this email&quot; in your todo list.<p>- The success state is simple. Is your inbox non-empty? Empty it. Is it empty? Go away.<p>- It&#x27;s about aggressive honesty. You won&#x27;t reply to your aunt&#x27;s email from 2 weeks ago. Replying with a one-sentence thing in 30 seconds is OK.<p>- It fits with &quot;email bankruptcy&quot;. Honesty and feeling of dread means you should really just empty your inbox.<p>the core thing is that it removes decision-making from the process of checking your email. For people who struggle with organisation, this is a bit of a godsend. Sure, you still have to reply, but for a lot of people following the Inbox Zero rules you&#x27;ll end up feeling a lot less <i>totally useless</i> stress from staring at your inbox (even if it&#x27;s just somewhere else).<p>It&#x27;s sensible advice for people who don&#x27;t have a working system. If you have a working system, you should totally use that though, it probably works better for you. Though maybe  your system isn&#x27;t working as well as you might hope, so it&#x27;s always good to experiment.