I read about someone who, after returning from a hiatus at work, found themselves so paralyzed by the mountain of unread emails in their inbox that they did something radical: they deleted their entire Inbox. And replaced it with a single outgoing message that said something along the lines of, "If you were waiting for a response from me and haven't received one, please reach out again."
My first reaction when I read this was shock. Is that even legal? That’s so audacious, though. But the more I thought about it, I saw the action as genius.
I'm currently in a similar boat, except my version involves a backlog of unreturned phone calls. These aren't just professional loose ends. They range from social messages I let slip to overdue condolence messages to friends and family who're by now definitely wondering if I even care. I can feel bad karma building as I write this. I know exactly what you're thinking: instead of writing all this, why don't you just pick up the phone? You’re right.
But there's something about the weight of accumulated avoidance that makes even simple actions feel impossible. The longer you leave something, the heavier it gets, and paradoxically, the harder it becomes to act. Psychologists call this the Zeigarnik effect: our minds hold onto unfinished tasks with a kind of nagging persistence, creating low-level background stress that drains our mental bandwidth. The cruel irony is that the very thing causing the anxiety is the thing we keep putting off, which only deepens the anxiety. Round and round we go.
As William James, the father of American psychology, put it:
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
Which is why the idea of wiping the slate clean is so appealing, not just logistically, but psychologically. It's essentially a self-administered fresh start.
Researchers at the Wharton School have actually studied this phenomenon, describing it as the "fresh start effect". The idea that temporal landmarks (a new year, a Monday, a birthday, even just a new month) give us psychological permission to leave past failures behind and recommit to our goals. The slate doesn't actually change. But our relationship to it does. These moments create a sense of discontinuity between our past and present selves, allowing us to psychologically distance ourselves from our prior failures.
The slate is not wiped clean by luck or by time. It's wiped clean by a decision.
That's what the email nuclear option really was. Not a logistical solution, but a decision. A declaration: I am starting from here.
I'm finding the same pull in decluttering. Sometimes, mid-sort, I hit a wall where I just want to throw everything out rather than agonize over what stays and what goes. The Marie Kondo method is all well and good, but sometimes the mental overhead of evaluating each item, asking "Do I want to keep this?", "Would I ever use this again? is its own form of exhaustion. There's a reason the "burn it all down" impulse is so universally understood. It's the fantasy of frictionless freedom.
And clean slates do create a kind of freedom. Psychologists who study decision fatigue, the deteriorating quality of decisions made after long sessions of deliberation, would probably have sympathy for anyone who's ever stared at a wardrobe full of things they haven't touched in eighteen months and thought: just, all of it, out. Fewer possessions, fewer emails, fewer outstanding obligations mean fewer micro-decisions draining your cognitive reserves every day.
But here's the part I keep coming back to: wiping the slate clean only works if we also address the attitude that filled the slate in the first place.
I can delete my inbox. I can return every call this week. I can sit in an empty room (okay, but I’m keeping my books) with a clear conscience. But if I continue leaving emails unopened, ignoring calls, buying things I don't need, six months from now, I'll be right back here. Same mess, same paralysis, same blog post.
And any grace that friends and family might extend once, the understanding, the benefit of the doubt, may not happen the second time. We don't get to wipe the slate clean over and over without consequences to trust, relationships, and our own sense of integrity.
The slate is not the problem. The hand that writes on it is.
There's a concept in behavioral psychology called substitution — the idea that you can't simply remove a habit, you have to replace it with something else. The urge to ignore, to defer, to accumulate doesn't disappear just because you've cleared the decks. It needs somewhere to go. Which means a genuine clean slate isn't just a reset, it's the starting line for building something different.
Which requires us to introspect and ask the one question that’s really at the heart of this matter:
What are you actually prioritizing, and why?
Because the backlog of calls, the ignored inbox, the accumulating clutter in the closet are not really about time management or forgetfulness. They're a legible record of where attention went instead. The slate just makes it visible.
I’m still trying to answer this question honestly, and I know when I do that, I wouldn’t have just cleared the slate. I’d wield the chalk more wisely.